Category: Tim Bowness (no-man)

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Review of the Year – 2024 – Prog Rock

2024 was a stunning year for Prog Rock new and old

The Cover of Living and Alive by Beatrix Players
The Cover of  Living & Alive by Beatrix Players

The Return of Beatrix Players

Beatrix Players, led by Ms Amy Birks, made a welcome return to the progressive rock scene in late 2023 with the release of their album Living and Alive. In 2024, they brought the complete album to Manchester’s Band on the Wall and then to a triumphant home gig in the village of Barlaston, near Stoke-on-Trent. Birks was heavily pregnant and jokingly complained of ‘baby brain’; she has since given birth to a baby daughter. In the meantime, Birks and her band were superb live. Birks was a charismatic leader, her wonderfully expressive voice ranging from a warm, low mezzo to a high soprano, sometimes urgent in her delivery and at other times quietly intimate – often in the same song. She was a powerful stage presence, drawing the audience in, as their enthusiastic response showed. 

Myrkur - image by Gobinder Jhitta
Amalie Bruun (Myrkur)

Myrkur – Danish Black Metal and Scandinavian folk music

The Danish composer, vocalist, and classically trained multi-instrumentalist Amalie Bruun released her debut album under her own name in 2006. In 2011, she formed the indie pop duo Ex Cops with Brian Harding. The band split in 2014, and she started releasing music under the name Myrkur, Icelandic for darkness. In late 2023, she released Spine, which combines many of the styles of previous albums into a sophisticated whole, graced by her remarkably versatile voice. The album was partly based on her experience of being pregnant with her son Otto, who was born in 2019.

But the song My Blood is Gold, reviewed here in the ongoing Off the Beaten Track series, is a product of another significant life event: the death of her beloved father, Michael Bruun, in 2021. This profoundly moving track perfectly describes Bruun’s despair at her father’s death and her resolve for his memory to live on through her music.

Bruun brought her music to London in April 2024, demonstrating her versatility as a singer and songwriter in an eclectic set. Over the course of four albums and various EPs and singles, she has combined black metal with Scandinavian folk music, sometimes on the same album. Her latest album, Spine, her most eclectic yet, formed the bulk of the setlist, including a run of six songs at the start of the show. Bruun was joined on stage by Swedish folk singer Jonathan Hultén, the support act, in a gorgeous version of House Carpenter, a traditional Nordic folk song, attracting the most excited applause of the evening.

The front cover of SIRIN by Marjana Semkina
Marjana Semkina on the cover of her second solo album, SIRIN

Marjana Semkina and iamthemorning – a difficult but artistically successful year

Marjana Semkina is a member of the prog rock group iamthemorning with her Russian-born compatriot, the pianist Gleb Kolyadin, both of whom are now resident in the UK. The duo have released several records, the most recent being The Bell (2019) and the EP Counting The Ghosts (2020).

Semkina has recently pursued a parallel solo career, releasing her first solo LP, Sleepwalking, in 2020 and her EP, Disillusioned, in 2021. In 2024 she sang on the Moonflower EP with Zora Cock of Blackbriar, and released SIRIN, her second solo album. Semkina created this album without the support of a record label, raising tens of thousands of pounds for the project via crowd funding. She is an exceptional talent, as a singer and a songwriter, and a passionate promoter of her poetic and profound vision of the world through her music.

Semkina had a challenging year. Her bandmate Kolyadin was arrested and imprisoned in Thailand while on tour as a session musician with the Russian dissident rock band Bi-2. He faced deportation to Russia, where the band could have been persecuted for anti-war sentiments. Semkina highlighted the story via social media and an online petition.

Kolyadin was released after a week in prison and returned to England via Israel. A few days after his release, the duo performed an emotional comeback show at Piano Smithfield in London. Later in the year, the duo were joined by a full band to perform iamthemorning songs at St. Matthias Church in Stoke Newington, London. Semkina began with an evocative selection of her solo material, and Kolyadin demonstrated his supreme skill as an improviser in a solo piano set before the iamthemorning band played a superb band set.

The Cover of Harmonic Divergence by Steven Wilson

An Overview of Steven Wilson’s Year

While fans of Steven Wilson eagerly await his new album The Overview due in March, in 2024 he released a Record Store Day album Harmonic Divergence based on his 2023 album The Harmony Codex. Producer Ewan Pearson also remixed ‘Inclination’ from that album. Alexis Petridis of The Guardian wrote, ‘Ewan Pearson sprinkles sunlit Balearic euphoria’, and Wilson described the remix as ‘a hypnotic cosmic disco odyssey.’

The year also saw the re-release of Storm Corrosion, the collaboration between Wilson and Mikael Åkerfeldt of Swedish progressive metal band Opeth, in a new Dolby Atmos remix. Wilson has been making surround mixes of his own and other bands’ albums for so long now that he has been asked to do a surround sound mix of King Crimson’s Red for the second time after he did his first surround mix of the album in 2009. He decided to teach himself the art of surround sound mixing after Elliot Scheiner created 5.1 mixes of the Porcupine Tree albums In Absentia and Deadwing.

As Mikael Åkerfeldt admitted, Storm Corrosion isn’t an easy listen. However, it is certainly not as challenging to listen to as the albums Wilson has produced for his Bass Communion project, such as Ghosts on Magnetic Tape. Both albums take a while to give up their secrets and bring joy to the listener. In the Dolby Atmos mix of Storm Corrosion, the opening track makes the most startling use of the new technology. On other tracks, the effect is more muted, but when surround sound is used, it’s more effective as it is used sparingly.

Finally, in 2024, Wilson brought festive greetings to his fans with a physical release of his 2023 Christmas song, December Skies, complete with two Wilson-themed Christmas cards. The year also marked the fifth anniversary of the release of love you to bits, Wilson’s album with his no-man bandmate Tim Bowness, a melancholy disco masterpiece.                                        

Cover of Perpetual Motions by Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard
Perpetual Motions by Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard

Perpetual Change with Gavin Harrison and Antoine Fafard

Gavin Harrison, the drummer in Steven Wilson’s band Porcupine Tree, released Perpetual Motions, his second album with bass player Antoine Fafard, a collection of inventive musical explorations and collaborations from the virtuosic duo and several friends. The album’s title describes the perpetual change of musical arrangement from one of Fafard’s compositions to the next, the only constant being the playing of Fafard and Harrison on every piece. Remarkably, Fafard presented Harrison with complete recordings to add drums and percussion later; Harrison’s playing perfectly matches the pieces so it’s impossible to tell that his recordings were done separately. 

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland
Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland of Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate

Malcolm Galloway had a more than Adequate Year

Malcolm Galloway of Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate provided deep insights into his health condition and his writing process in a fascinating two-part interview: Part One and Part Two are here. Galloway and his bandmate Mark Gatland have a new album out in March, The Uncertainty Principle. In the meantime, One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov), one of the singles from the album, was released in 2024. It’s a compelling snapshot of a moral dilemma in which one man’s brave decision probably averted World War III. Hats Off shared the bill in Camden, London with a new discovery for me, the band EBB, who have a wonderful stage presence.

Prog the Forest at the Fiddler’s Elbow

Malcolm Galloway and Mark Gatland, with the promoter London Prog Gigs, hosted a charity prog festival, Prog the Forest, at the Fiddler’s Elbow in Camden. All performers gave their services for free to support the rainforest and wildlife conservation charity, World Land Trust, which ‘protects the world’s most biologically significant and threatened habitats.’ This was the sixth year of Prog the Forest and the most successful to date, raising £2750 to protect nearly 26 acres of rainforest and other threatened habitats.

The eclectic line-up was made up of: Spriggan Mist, a ‘pagan progressive rock band’; singer-songwriter Leoni Jane Kennedy, who was hand-picked by members of Queen for the Freddie Mercury Scholarship and plays acoustic Rush covers as well as her own songs; The Mighty Handful who include a ‘former music director of Strictly; Mountainscape who play instrumental post-metal; Theo Travis of Soft Machine, who has played saxophone and flute with numerous jazz and prog bands; Tim Bowness and Butterfly Mind; and Hats Off Gentlemen It’s Adequate.

Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets at Manchester Apollo
Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets

Prog History Brought to Life

The late 1960s to the mid-1970s were arguably the golden era of Prog Rock, particularly in the UK, but as can be seen from the reviews above, the genre continues to thrive, with superb new music being produced both on record and live.

New life has also been breathed into prog rock classics, with the return of Nick Mason’s Saucerful of Secrets with live interpretations of early Pink Floyd songs. Robin A Smith continued to tour Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells – the 50th anniversary, with a stunning new arrangement of the classic album; 2024 was also the 50th anniversary of the release of Peter Hammill’s solo album The Silent Corner and the Empty Stage, from which the epic track ‘A Louse is not a Home‘ is taken.

Special Thanks

With thanks to Jerry Ewing and Prog magazine for keeping the prog flag flying, and to Chris Parkins of London Prog Gigs for his tireless contribution to the live scene in London.

For an overview of the year in classical music in 2024, click here.

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love you to bits by no-man – Album Review

A melancholy disco masterpiece

*****

Love you to bits is the seventh studio album by no-man, the long-running collaboration between Steven Wilson, frontman of Porcupine Tree and a solo artist, and singer and co-writer Tim Bowness, who is also a well-established solo artist. The band was formed in the late 1980s and signed to the label that also featured Björk, and for a little while it appeared that the band would be the most successful of Wilson and Bowness’s many projects. Wilson went on to have far more success with Porcupine Tree, whose most recent album Closure /Continuation reached number 2 in the charts. His most recent solo album The Harmony Codex reached number 4; by comparison love you to bits reached number 94 when it was released in November 2019. But don’t let that put you off; the album is a masterpiece of moody electronica and disco beats.

The album took 25 years to complete. It was begun in 1994 and then left languishing on a hard drive until its completion in the summer of 2019. It’s divided into two parts, love you to bits (bits 1-5) and love you to pieces (pieces 1-5). It describes the breakup of a relationship from the perspective of both protagonists, sometimes separately and sometimes both at once. Helpfully, the lyrics in the cd booklet are colour-coded to make it clear which point of view is being expressed.

On the surface, the album is very simple. It’s basically one song repeated many times, with an earworm of a chorus. But on repeated listening the album reveals great richness and subtlety. Each of the two tracks is divided into five segued sections, and the structure of each track feels more like a suite of classical pieces, a theme and variations, than a standard pop album. Listening to it feels like climbing up a hill – there seems to be little change as you walk higher up the hill, but glancing back over your shoulder you realise how far you have travelled and how the landscape has changed. It’s a journey well worth taking.

Part 1 Love you to bits

Bit 1 starts deep in the heart of an industrial soundscape, out of which emerges a muscular disco bassline and a four-to-the-floor insistent drum beat. This contrasts with Bowness’s heart-wrenching vocals as he looks back over a broken relationship,

who are you holding?
how are you coping?
did you move on, or stay behind?

Here, as throughout the album his vocals are gentle, intimate and contemplative, beautifully expressing sorrow and heartache.

In Bit 2 the disco bass line continues while a mournful synth line floats about, and the vocals submit to the misery and exhaustion of weeping for lost love, eventually fading out completely as if the protagonist has given up, while the instruments continue playing.

Bit 3 is perhaps the highlight of the whole album, a thrillingly visceral guitar break, effortlessly funky, a minute of pure joy before the vocals stutter back in.

Bit 4 begins with a similar instrumental feel to the electronica of Wilson’s track ‘Personal Shopper’ from The Future Bites (2021). Ash Soan’s virtuoso rolling drums bring a sense of drama to the track; his playing is superb throughout the album. The guitar solo from David Kollar is startlingly angular, summoning up the spirit of King Crimson at their most deliciously dystopian. Appropriately enough, David has (according to his website) been described by King Crimson guitarist Pat Mastelotto as ‘one of the most innovative and driven young guitarists on the scene today’.

Bit 5 begins with enthusiastic sequenced synthesisers and a powerful drum break, and haunting echoing background vocals repeating the words ‘I love you’ that gradually morph into a gorgeously melancholic brass band arrangement that perfectly expresses the ‘heartache’ described in the lyrics.

Part 2 Love you to pieces

Part 2 is in some ways more inward-looking and contemplative than Part 1, and perhaps not as immediately accessible, but it repays repeated listening.

Piece 1 begins in a very gentle, soul-searching mood and gradually comes to life, with heavy use of evocative echo effects as the track progresses.

In Piece 2 we are suddenly thrown into a very dark place, with an oppressive, pulsating bass line as the two former lovers argue bitterly, ‘we got everything right… and everything wrong’. A frenetic electric piano solo takes us into the world of jazz, and in particular Miles Davis in his later electronic period – not surprising as it’s played by Adam Holzman who also played in Miles’ band on Tutu (1986). The track is another highlight of the album.

Piece 3 arrives like a ray of light out of the gloom of Piece 2. Glittering synthesisers sparkle like the ‘stardust’ in the lover’s eyes, quelling for the moment ‘my constant sense of dread’.

In Piece 4 for a moment as everything goes right in the relationship we seem to be floating in the ether, although the occasional slightly discordant note suggests the ‘dread’ that lurks far below on the earth. The dream ends as it implodes with a sound like a cassette tape unspooling as the music unravels.

Piece 5 ends in the depths of despair – one lover refers to ‘fights in the hallway’ and the other says ‘you got colder and colder’. We are in an emotional Arctic, Bowness’s desolate vocals accompanied by a slow, lugubrious piano. Finally, ‘time disappears’, and our journey has ended, leaving is to contemplate, ‘how did we get here?’

Personnel

Steven Wilson – all instruments except as listed below
Tim Bowness – Vocals
Written and Produced by no-man

Additional musicians: 
The Dave Desmond Brass Quintet (Brass on track 1 bits) 
Ash Soan (Drums) 
Pete Morgan (Electric Bass on track 1 pieces) 
Adam Holzman (Electric Piano Solo on track 2 pieces) 
David Kollar (Guitar Solo on track 1 bits) 

This Blog was originally published on 10 August 2020, and updated on 22 December 2024 to celebrate the album’s fifth anniversary.

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Off the Beaten Track # 2: Pigeon Drummer by no-man

schoolyard ghosts by no-man

Art-rock band no-man were founded in 1987 when Steven Wilson and Tim Bowness started writing music together. They briefly flirted with mainstream success in 1990 when their single release colours was Single Of The Week in Melody Maker and Sounds, leading to record label and publishing deals. Wilson went on to have much more success with Porcupine Tree and as a solo artist, but no-man continued to release albums sporadically, including their most recent, love you to bits in 2019. The duo have more recently collaborated on their podcast The Album Years.

‘Pigeon Drummer’ comes from the band’s sixth album Schoolyard Ghosts released in May 2008. The song evolved from a demo by Tim Bowness called ‘City Sounds’ which can be heard here. Bowness later used the lyrics on ‘wherever there is light.’ The track ‘Pigeon Drummer’ was written at a time when Wilson was starting to move away from Porcupine Tree to focus on his solo career. His first solo album Insurgentes was released in November 2008.

What is remarkable about this track, and some of the songs on Insurgentes, is the sudden and shocking descent into extreme noise after a beautifully melodic section. This happens very quickly on ‘Pigeon Drummer’ after only about 30 seconds. When Wilson uses the same technique on Insurgentes, on songs like ‘Salvaging’, the noise section appear much later in the track. Wilson had been listening to the noise project Merzbow, started in 1979 by the Japanese artist Masami Akita, and enjoying the disruptive effect the use of noise had on melodic tracks, like obliterating an Old Master painting with black ink.

Wilson has often spoken of his love of cinema, and the term ‘cinematic’ often applies to both the sound of his music and the structure of his songs. Bowness’s demo version, ‘City Sounds’ and ‘Pigeon Drummer’ share a cinematic structure. ‘Pigeon Drummer’ opens with a music box. After a burst of noise, there’s a guitar theme that might remind some listeners of the guitar at the start of ‘Dream is Collapsing’ from Hans Zimmer’s score for Inception (2010). But if that film is science-fiction, a deeply philosophical, multi-layered thriller, the no-man song is perhaps closer in structure to the European art-house movies Wilson so admires. The juxtaposition of sweetly haunting melodic sections with extreme noise has the non-linear narrative of films by the Spanish iconoclast Luis Buñuel.

The track also seems to draw from another film genre; horror. The song adopts the trope of contrasting an insouciantly sun-lit scene with a subsequent scene of violent horror. The music box could have come from Philip Glass’s score for the original Candyman film. The tolling bell, and the ethereal choir could also have come from a horror film score. There’s also something unsettling about Bowness’s vocals, which are as sweetly and gently delivered as ever but heavily compressed to give them a slightly inhuman quality, a technique Wilson often uses on Porcupine Tree albums such as on the songs about serial killers on In Absentia (2002)

Whether you choose to view ‘Pigeon Drummer’ as a slice of art/noise rock, a homage to the structure of avant-garde European cinema, or the soundtrack to a horror film, it’s an extremely evocative and effective piece of music.

This post was updated on 29 August 2023 at 10.50 to add references to Bowness’s demo version ‘City Sounds.’

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love you to bits by no-man – Album Review

A melancholy disco masterpiece

*****

Love you to bits is the seventh studio album by no-man the long-running collaboration between Steven Wilson former frontman of Porcupine Tree and now a solo artist, and singer Tim Bowness. The band was formed in the late 1980s and signed to the label that also featured Björk, and for a little while it appeared that the band would be the most successful of Steven Wilson’s many projects. Wilson went on to have far more success with Porcupine Tree whose most recent album Closure /Continuation reached number 2 in the charts. Steven’s most recent solo album The Harmony Codex reached number 4; by comparison love you to bits reached number 94 when it was released late in 2019. But don’t let that put you off; the album is a masterpiece of moody electronica and disco beats.

The album has taken 25 years to complete. It was begun in 1994 and then left languishing on a hard drive until its completion in the summer of 2019. It’s divided into two parts, love you to bits (bits 1-5) and love you to pieces (pieces 1-5). It describes the breakup of a relationship from the perspective of both protagonists separately, and sometimes both at once. Helpfully, the lyrics in the cd booklet are colour-coded to make it clear which point of view is being expressed.

On the surface, the album is very simple. It’s basically one song repeated many times, with an earworm of a chorus. But on repeated listening the album reveals great richness and subtlety. Each of the two tracks is divided into five segued sections, and the structure of each track feels more like a suite of classical pieces, a theme and variations, than a standard pop album. Listening to it feels like climbing up a hill – there seems to be little change as you walk higher up the hill, but glancing back over your shoulder you realise how far you have travelled and how the landscape has changed. It’s a journey well worth taking.

Part 1 Love you to bits

Love you to bits (Bit 1 – 5)

Bit 1 starts deep in the heart of an industrial soundscape, out of which emerges a muscular disco bassline and a four-to-the floor insistent drum beat. This contrasts with Tim Bowness’ heart-wrenching vocals as he looks back over a broken relationship, 

who are you holding?
how are you coping?
did you move on, or stay behind?

Here, as throughout the album Tim’s vocals are gentle, intimate and contemplative, beautifully expressing sorrow and heartache.

In Bit 2 the disco bass line continues with a mournful synth line floats about, while the vocals submit to the misery and exhaustion of weeping for lost love, eventually fading out completely as if the protagonist has given up, while the instruments continue playing.

Bit 3 is perhaps the highlight of the whole album, a thrillingly visceral guitar break, effortlessly funky, a minute of pure joy before the vocals stutter back in.

Bit 4 begins with a similar instrumental feel to the electronica of Steven Wilson’s most recent release, the track Personal Shopper, perhaps suggesting the new musical direction he will pursue on his next album, The Future Bites (now postponed until next January due to Covid-19). Ash Soan’s virtuoso rolling drums bring a sense of drama to the track; his playing is superb throughout the album. The guitar solo from David Kollar is startlingly angular, summoning up the spirit of King Crimson at their most deliciously dystopian. Appropriately enough, David has (according to his website) been described by King Crimson guitarist Pat Mastelotto as ‘one of the most innovative and driven young guitarists on the scene today’.

Bit 5 begins with enthusiastic sequenced synthesisers and a powerful drum break, and haunting echoing background vocals repeating the words ‘I love you’ that gradually morph into a gorgeously melancholic brass band arrangement that perfectly expresses the ‘heartache’ described in the lyrics.


Part 2 Love you to pieces

Love you to pieces (Piece 1 – 5)

Part 2 is in some ways more inward-looking and contemplative than Part 1, and perhaps not as immediately accessible, but it repays repeated listening.

Piece 1 begins in a very gentle, soul-searching mood and gradually comes to life, with heavy use of evocative echo effects as the track progresses.

In Piece 2 we are suddenly thrown into a very dark place, with an oppressive, pulsating bass line as the two former lovers argue bitterly, ‘we got everything right’…’and everything wrong’. A frenetic electric piano solo takes us into the world of jazz, and in particular Miles Davis in his later electronic period – not surprising as it’s played by Adam Holzman who also played in Miles’ band on Tutu. The track is another highlight of the album.

Piece 3 arrives like a ray of light in out of the gloom of Piece 2. Glittering synthesisers sparkle like the ‘stardust’ in the lover’s eyes, quelling for the moment ‘my constant sense of dread’.

In Piece 4 for a moment as everything goes right in the relationship we seem to be floating in the ether, although the occasional slightly discordant note suggests the ‘dread’ that lurks far below on the earth. The dream ends as it implodes in on itself with a sound like a cassette tape unspooling as the music unravels.

Piece 5 ends in the depths of despair – one love refers to ‘fights in the hallway’ and the other says ‘you got colder and colder’. We are in an emotional Arctic, Tim’s desolate vocals accompanied by a slow, lugubrious piano. Finally, ‘time disappears’, and our journey has ended; how did we get here?

Piece 2

Personnel

Steven Wilson – all instruments except as listed below

Tim Bowness – Vocals

Written and Produced by No-Man

Additional musicians: 

The Dave Desmond Brass Quintet (Brass on track 1 bits) 

Ash Soan (Drums) 

Pete Morgan (Electric Bass on track 1 pieces) 

Adam Holzman (Electric Piano Solo on track 2 pieces) 

David Kollar (Guitar Solo on track 1 bits) 

Release date

November 2019