Formed in Prague the late 1990s and having undergone a variety of line up changes across four albums, Czech hard rocking proggers Votchi have stabilised both their membership and sound while looking beyond their borders. Founding member Mirek Mužík (keyboards/vocals) is now augmented by singer Alex McBeat, guitarist Martin Smejkal, bassist Dominik Vozobule, drummer Jan […]
The guitarist mashing up prog genres to build his ultimate wall of sound. “I want it to be a celebration of instrumental guitar in all its forms,” says Michael Astley-Brown, the man behind Maebe. Raised in The Cotswolds, Astley-Brown grew up on grunge and pop-punk before discovering the joys of post-rock at university, where hearing […]
Incorrigible oddballs always find their way to prog in the end. For the first part of his musical career, multi-instrumentalist Craig Schmuhl was guitarist and frontman with a death metal band called Hate Storm Annihilation. Today, he releases music as The Mystical Hot Chocolate Endeavors. The project’s latest release, //A Clock Without A Craftsman//, is […]
Canadian prog metal multi-instrumentalist reflects on the rise of AI with jam-packed third album Pullquote//“Whatever happens when the album comes out, I’m not going to have any regrets.” Body//“The feeling that I wanted to come out of this album was that I wanted, absolutely under all circumstances, to love every second of passing music,” Pomegranate […]
On the day //Prog// speaks to him, session gun and solo artist Ben Reed is re-shelving and re-alphabetising his enormous vinyl collection. He has around 10,000 records, only a few of them on CD, and he doesn’t do digital – he’s never downloaded nor streamed a song in his life. “I would never listen to […]