post rock / progressive rock

I'm not a gamer. The few computer games I play appear rather laughable to the die-hard gaming community. While some are occupied with first person shooting games and others conquer ancient online worlds, I build cities or have my Sim do quite normal stuff. On the other hand, I would like to make a game. I already have a few ideas. One of them is the game being stuffed with music, mostly to enhance the atmosphere but also because I think some artists create perfect music for this kind of stuff. And that takes me to Indian one-man project Mixtaped Monk, who recently released his new album. 'How To Live Inside A VMMORPG', a neat progressive post rock album.

The story behind he album is pretty neat. A group of gamers gets stuck into a Virtual Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, titled 'Tales From Skylar'. Unable to log-out, the group now lives in the game and faces real challenges. The eight songs represent different situations and one of those tracks is the best piece of music I've heard Arka produce. While opener 'It took Forever to Decipher the meaning behind it All' is loyal to the progressive guitar driven sound of Mixtaped Monk, 'We exist in a place Hidden away from the Stars' is a musical chef d'oeuvre. Moody and melancholic, this tune expresses something playful and soothing.

Although the music is slow, Mixtaped Monk comes up with rhythm and repetitive sequences over which he frolics with guitar solos. 'Rock is still Alive but We are not' is a great example of that approach. Driving on a pulsating bass and drums foundation, the guitars whirl and flutter. Here and there Santana comes to mind. Arka is one of those musicians who prefer high notes over droning bass lines and that might set him apart from most post rock acts. Instead of bands like Explosions In The Sky or Godspeed, Mixtaped Monk seems to be inspired by Mike Oldfield and Steven Wilson.

So, if you're looking for decent progressive rock music, I'm quite sure this album will satisfy your needs. I only wonder, as I do so often with one-man acts, what would happen if Arka turns this project into a live band. The songs are great, the atmosphere is spot-on and the overall quality of this release is certainly good enjoy to be enjoyed in a live setting. Perhaps we will never know. All I know is that 'How To Live Inside A VMMORPG' is another excellent set of compositions, destined to be explored and enjoyed by a large group of prog-rock fans.


Serge

post rock / post metal

noise rock / jazz / experimental

doom / sludge

psychedelic / doom / stoner rock

ambient

house / techno / electronic

dark ambient

ambient / experimental

electronic / downtempo

bandcamp

heavy metal

black metal / death metal

ambient

Audiobulb

​Serge

stoner rock / progressive / experimental

bandcamp

Different Layers of Fear is an album released on May 10, by Romanian stoner/psychedelic rock band Methadone Skies. A very interesting and abrasive album, the level of powerful energy, consistency and creative strength demonstrated by this work is simply above all the extraordinary measurements one can imagine, much more by their creative audacity than the beauty of the music itself. With elegant and symmetric, though mostly diluted harmonies, the style of the group gravitates towards a vast and dense cosmogony of dynamic, but synchronic musical tonalities, where a modest degree of experimentalism and graciousness showcases a proverbial and dispersive sense of lugubrious tenacity. 

Seventy-one minutes long, Different Layers of Fear has seven very extensive tracks:
1) Where Were You When We Were Into the Void?; 2) God Help Us All; 3) Focus; 4) Contra; 5) Ol' Painless; 6) A Glitch in the Sun; 7) Manos; though the album eventually resents itself of some degree of monotony – given the length of some songs –, this beautiful work has a formidable set of qualities, intrinsic to its exceedingly peculiar, delightful and audacious musical style. With expansive melodies and a dynamic density that lives by the color of its graciously designed and sculpted sonorous atmosphere, the general creative diagram displayed by the songs revolves around a rhythmic synergy between creativity and technique, that proves to be a major point of cohesion in the axis of the group’s restless, but competent style.  

With a gracefully vivacious sound that departs from the horizon of its sometimes slow, but consistent patterns, this album is a collection of lovable dream-like symphonies, that definitely creates a peculiar, but methodic universe of harmonies within its diluted introspective existence. As the album evolves, the sound becomes more serene, perceptive and transparent, showcasing a stylish lucidity whose clear visibility exposes a strong and visceral degree of musical authenticity, whose standards definitely highlights the most formidable virtues – stability, cohesion, serenity – displayed by the band. 

With vocals eventually surfacing a little after forty-minutes, this additional surprise comes as a pleasant quality that aggregates a gracious element of sensibility and grandiosity within the band’s musical atmosphere. All along the way, Different Layers of Fear proves itself to be a majorly epic, genuine and ambitious album, whose ostensible levels of excellence, experimentalism and originality certainly will please all enthusiasts of the genre, possessing all the necessary qualities to shake and to take the underground scene by storm, with a natural and inherent artistic authority.  


Wagner

metal

metal / death metal

facebook

progressive rock / experimental

psychedelic rock / doom

hard rock

progressive metal

psychedelic rock /  doom

sludge metal / doom

black metal

alternative rock / psychedelic / noise rock

progressive rock

Dark Matter is an album released in March 29, by Polish progressive rock guitarist Tomasz Piwecki. Almost fifty minutes long, the record has nine tracks: 1) Nebula; 2) Dark matter; 3) Earth; 4) Moonlight; 5) Serum vitae; 6) Eye of the cyclone; 7) Path; 8) Storm; 9) Walls; an interesting album with highly energetic, dense and impulsive guitar lines, Dark Matter is an almost surreal journey throughout a multilayered diagram of colorful, pungent and pervasive, though somewhat ambivalent harmonies, that highlights the colossal greatness of its deeply precious and imponderable virtues, abruptly convoluted in a horizon of lucid, though proverbially diluted creativity. 

An interesting album with beautiful harmonies, Dark Matter is – anatomically and sonorously speaking – profoundly conventional, though competent and decent instrumental progressive rock. Despite some generic passages, the album is exceedingly satisfactory and its music has an organic, vibrant disposition, as well as a salutary and vivacious degree of dynamism. With ascendant harmonies devised by a dispersive mosaic of expansive guitar lines, the music style of Tomasz Piwecki is expressively lucid and sober, and definitely aggregates, though in a relatively moderate scale, a graciously genuine level of inventiveness into the genre. 

Despite some limitations – and a minor degree of musical predictabilities –, Dark Matter reveals itself to be a very good album, all the way through. With marvelously competent and proficient technical skills, Tomasz Piwecki proves that there is nothing he can’t do with a guitar. His compositional skills knows no boundaries or selective tendencies. An intelligent, complex and highly functional artist that knows how to design and display sound into different shapes, atmospheres and distinctive tonalities, this exceptional musician delivers to his audience a highly intense and pungent selection of guitar driven symphonies. 

Primordially recommended to enthusiasts of progressive rock, there is nothing in Dark Matter that you haven’t heard before in other albums of the genre. Nevertheless, the album is successful at achieving an unexpected degree of genuine artistry, gradually revealing a talented, dedicated and audacious musician that definitely conceives with his masterful creative sensibility a very personal style, fantastically exposing with his eagerness the graceful delicacy of his introspective musical restlessness. Definitely, Dark Matter is an interesting progressive rock album, that – despite some level of rhythmic and melodic limitations – has enough qualities to be moderately appreciated.


Wagner

progressive rock / post rock / progressive rock

One of the reasons why I started this whole Merchants Of Air thing was to push underrated albums and artists who rarely seem to be featured elsewhere. The world of music is so vast and so magnificent that many interesting acts get left behind and that's a shame. So I started seeking them and writing about them. Soon they started finding us and in only a few years time there was an overwhelming amount of albums coming in, many of which are still in my day-to-day playlist. 'All The Useless Spinning' by Polish duo Miist is one of those underrated and underappreciated albums, one which takes me back to the roots of Merchants Of Air.

Miist is Michał Koczor on guitars & synths and Robert 'Falon' Kułakowski on drums. They seem to share a mutual love for jamming, which almost continuously shines through on these tunes. They also share an admiration for psychedelic and progressive rock, plus they have at least three albums by post rock bands in their collection. In their rehearsing studio, they mix all of these elements and influences together into a neat collection of immersive and energetic compositions and luckily for us, those tunes are now available on CD.

The album opens with the long 'Philosophy of Pessimism'. This anthem immediately sets the tone: atmospheric, cinematic, immersive and quite often overwhelming. Although coined as heavy psychedelic rock, there is so much more to experience. Throughout the entire album I hear influences from bands like Monkey 3, My Sleeping Karma, Casa Sui but also Pink Floyd and even Tangerine Dream here and there. Yeah, instrumental, psychedelic and progressive but most of all immersive and captivating.

I'm not going into a song by song description on this one. The songs are quite similar in nature, driving on a mild tempo, delivering amazing guitar licks and solos, plus a high jam feel. The album feels like a concept record, with highly narrative melodies and plenty of variation to keep it interesting. So yes, this is an underrated album, one which deserves a lot more attention. Miist is a talented duo which ever progrocker needs to check out immediately.


​Serge

electronic / ambient / progressive / psychill

The Invisible Sun is an album released in March 29, by Serbian electronic music artist Branko Stojiljkovic, best known by the nom de plume Argus. An exceedingly imponderable, vast and effusive album, whose consistent and omnipotent atmosphere extends over diluted realms of gracefully harmonious and abstract infinities, the music of Argus filters and rejuvenates psychedelic elements in a delightful and wonderfully methodic prism of colorful algorithms of splendorous patterns, displaying an organic synergy of dynamic sonorous proclivities, that overemphasizes the exceptional fluidity of a fantastically elongated creative tissue.  

With nine tracks – 1) Questions; 2) Holy Smoke; 3) The Invisible Sun; 4) The Forest Sings; 5) You Are The Power; 6) Clouds; 7) Aurora; 8) On a Lonely Path; 9) Sadness; – the album is a veracious and genuine psychedelic journey throughout a marvelous spectacle of sounds, whose gracious sensitivity revolves around a vivacious ocean of serene and peaceful melodies, exposed in an expansive scale of revolving tenacity, that compresses the constrained essence of its own reasonable, introspective and gregarious grandiosity.   

With a lucid creativity that departs from the diluted tenderness of an infinite dispersive soul, the sound that irradiates from this album is a profoundly instinctive humane cosmogony, whose arbitrary exasperations are projected from the fertile grounds of its own originally distant musical sensibilities, although the amazingly beautiful compositions that are appreciated the entire time anticipates the fragmentary vitality of a gracefully pungent ordeal that unveils a formidable parallax of creativity, unable to stop at the pragmatic level of a splendorous and highly innovative versatile excellence.  

A formidably lancinating, cohesive and spectacularly fascinating psychedelic electronic music album that doesn’t fear being radically innovative and vastly different, The Invisible Sun is a colorful mosaic of perceptive sounds, whose immensely overwhelming and gracefully diligent style circulates within the vicinities of a cosmic dissidence, in a furiously creative turbulence, virtuous enough to reinvent a type of music that can understand the summary of its own objectives. A fantastic album whose original qualities basically creates a new sonorous diagram, The Invisible Sun is an audacious, pioneer and intuitive work of art, that defies genre boundaries and creates its own musical parameters within a diluted, but constructive dynamic of sound. 


Wagner

progressive rock

Ghost Kingdom is an album released on March 15, by Russian progressive rock act Ships Fly Up, a project of musician Egor Fedotov. Fifty-one minutes long, the record has nine tracks: 1) Ghost Kingdom; 2) About Death; 3) I'm with You; 4) Your Own World; 5) Take My Hand; 6) It Calls; 7) Strange Game; 8) Manifestation; 9) Anomaly; while delivering a more conventional instrumental style of progressive rock, Ghost Kingdom displays a genuine and melancholic beauty, whose depressive and placid sagacity overcomes and simultaneously contemplates the serenity of a sincere and majestic sonorous reality. With a dense, lucid and vast – but concomitantly graceful and expansive – musical layer, the style of Ships Fly Up is impregnated with a mordacious sensibility, that rescues within the most profound depths of the soul the intuitive solitude of an isolated and exasperated existence.

While the sound of this album definitely designs, defines and transmits perfectly the atmosphere of an extenuating, lugubrious and permanently obscure existence – but with a formidable degree of splendidly poetic beauty –, the sober and elusive style of Fedotov is abundantly marvelous and cohesively captivating. With wonderful, unique, sentimental and amazingly seductive guitar lines, Ghost Kingdom gradually reveals itself as an elegant, pure, authorial and pristine work of art, that evidently has established a moderately elevated musical standard for its imperative, but ostensibly diluted creative virtues, that gets better and better as the album evolves. 

With a wonderful style of his own, Fedotov exhibits a masterful domain of the guitar, displaying an impressive, iridescent and surreal degree of pulsating knowledge, effervescent competence and audacious precision, that highlights his exceptionally wonderful and brilliant compositional skills. While very tangentially the album – at least in certain passages –, does fall sometimes in the more conventional grounds of progressive rock, in a general evaluation, the latent beauty and the marvelous grandiosity the artist reveals abundantly in Ghost Kingdom unveils a splendorous state of the art work, full of peculiarly pungent, original and innovative virtues, that definitely consecrates Fedotov in a special, more contemplative and genuine category of musicians. 

With a relevant magnitude of symmetry and overwhelming grace, definitely Ghost Kingdom can be considered an exceptional and astoundingly magnificent work. Despite minor passages that sounds invariably generic, this album showcases a profoundly skilled and cohesive artist, whose sensational contributions has everything necessary to improve the genre, in the best way possible. 


Wagner

progressive rock

Arka Sengupta is already a household name here at Merchants Of Air. In the past few years, we have been following his one-man post rock act Mixtaped Monk. Now, he comes with something different. Not completely different but certainly different enough to release it under a brand new name, Home Brewed Universe.
With this project, Arka leaves the world of post rock behind and throws himself in the ever expanding progressive rock universe. The focus is still on instrumental music, mostly driven by guitars but it's those guitars who now gain the upperhand over the atmosphere, which might take a few minutes to get used to.

The album opens with 'Phosphorescence'. Immediately the programmed drums determine the foundation on which the guitars seem to improvise freely. That being said, most of the album focuses on immense guitar solos. 'Divergence' is an immersive anthem, with joyful piano and narrative solo work. Bands that come to mind include everything between Pink Floyd and Dream Theater, which I guess is not a bad set of bands to be compared with.

I think I wrote it before. What Arka does is excellent. He is a great composer and and excellent craftsman. Yet, I think that songs like 'Convergence I' or the beautiful 'Remembrance' could really come to their own in a full live setting. The overall feel is that of a well written progressive rock album which deserves a professional production, merely because of the artist's talent and vision. Then again, there is this stunning piece of music titled 'Reassurance', which convinces me of the overall quality of this album.

I'm sure that progressive rock fans with appreciate these tracks. Guitar players will absolutely adore the technical skills. Arka can wave to people like Malmsteen or Vai and smile, not just because of the countless of hours of practice but also because of the emotion he manages to put into the music. In all, this is a satisfying debut, one that makes me curious for the future of Home Brewed Universe. So for now, you'd might want to check this out. There is some abundant joy to be found here.


​Serge

progressive / black metal / doom

In The Woods… were once a legendary progressive metal band from Norway during the 90’s. They released a total of five studio albums, three singles, one compilation album and one live album throughout its initial existence. The band disbanded in 2000 and reformed surprisingly in 2014.

With the album Pure they continued their story with a new lead singer James Fogarty. In 2016 the Botteri brothers left the band leading onto Alex Weisbeek and Bernt Sørensen joining In the Woods... for bass and guitar sessions. Drummer Anders Kobro is the only original member left.

With all those band member changes In The Woods… sounds still like In The Woods… The sound of the band has still the same powerful resonance and intelligence like on the albums Omnio and Strange In Stereo. Cease The Day has a more varied and intensified sound. The music feels more atmospheric and has more black metal influences. Their weeping guitar sound has moved more towards a melodic direction with a very wide-ranging approach of vocals. Black metal screaming and clean singing joining each other in balance.

In The Woods… is still refining their sound and experimenting with various tunes and moods. The keyboards are used to give the songs on Cease The Day a creative and distinctive mood. Elements of doom, progressive and black metal are melted in this very interesting piece of work. Slow old school pieces chance to aggressive soaring black metal and visa versa. The guitars speed up and resonate heavier than they ever did before. 

Cease The Day is mind-bending with an avant-garde touch. In The Woods… shows that the path they walk is powerful and covered with surprising ambience. The story of this band hasn’t been told completely. From their debut Heart of the Ages (1995) until today with Cease The Day (2018), this band sounds still original, progressive, melodic, heavy, kaleidoscopic and timeless. We could stay day and night in the woods listening to In The Woods…

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Patsker