alternative rock

When we took a first glance at the cover of this promo we were already teased by the chaos and depth of the artwork (Mark Cruz Teix). The story of The Morganatics is one of progress. The debut album (Never Be Part Of Your World) followed by a live recording of a radio show and their second full recording (We Come From The Stars) were all released  in 2015. The band produced an album (Eternal Return : An Horizon of Infinite) with acoustical versions of songs from the two previous albums in 2016.



The Morganatics call their creations “rock based with a voice of Linkin Park meeting Archive’s atmosphere with Porcupine Tree's guitars”. Well, let us tell you that they have a point but… the two vocalists Seb  (also rhythm guitars and keyboards) and Chris (female vocals, sample and keyboards) have the same timbre as late Chester Bennington. We needed to listen very carefully to distinguish who was actually singing because they sound very alike… The album contains wide range singing with deep emotions and energy. We had mixed feelings with the track Gloria. The vocals sound like a mealy hymn for a commercial add. 

The atmosphere of the tracks is far-reaching, from psychedelic to moodiness and to avant-garde with electronic effects and samples. This band from Paris reaches, indeed, out to Porcupine Tree with their guitar sound. Lauris (lead & acoustic guitars) listened very good to Anathema, his guitar solos are inspired by the two Cavanagh brothers’ weeping sound. There are some unclean vocals by PM (also bass)on this recording. We would have welcomed some more for better variation and balance in the singing. There are two drummers mentioned in the info. Nico, original core member and drummer announced his departure during the production of this album,so Frank took over.

The Morganatics are strange duck in the music pool. Their music is very fused with all kinds of genres and styles, which gave them a somehow an original sound. We’ve  heard creative chemistry with shredding guitars combined with intense and emotional melodies. Melancholy and experimental drift were added to the energetic formula called The Love Riot Squad vs The F-world, which is to our opinion their best work, until now. 

Bands with the same experimental approach but different in style are Område (France) and Thy Catalfaque (Hungary) and Diabolo Swing Orchestra (Sweden).

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Patsker

post rock / progressive rock

Transmission Zero is a Polish post rock trio, that released on June 25 their eponymous debut album. With incisive, robust and grandiloquent harmonies, the sound of the band is made primarily of beautiful compositions, that aggrandize the discreet expansions of their splendid and diffusive melodies. Departing from the most basic elements of the genre, Transmission Zero displays a modest degree of originality, that works in the flow of their elegant and dynamic, though proverbially dense musical style, while at the same time their gracious and organic compositions abundantly exposes a dilated serenity, that encourages the rhythm to function in an expressively clear and salutary essence.  

A little more than forty-two minutes long, the record is relatively concise, and has six tracks: 1) Vostok 0; 2) Lost and Found; 3) Illusion of Coincidence; 4) Closed Circuit; 5) Adrift/Alive; 6) Transgression; with a modest intensity that sometimes overemphasizes a respectable degree of minimalism, the sound of Transmission Zero is a primordially diluted, calm and transcendental journey into a deeply expansive, almost infinite everlasting realm of glorious symphonies, that conceives an atmosphere of sensible and introspective density, where life can be felt as a surrealist, but hermetic dream; one that is so strong, that the ordinary contingencies of existence will never be able to disrupt or to suppress its continuously growing strength, or to restrict the imperative nature of its vividness.

With exceedingly marvelous progressive elements intricately inserted into the musical layout, Transmission Zero elaborates on interesting and rapturous guitar lines the most sober and dynamic harmonies, though occasionally the sound resents itself of a certain level of generic and delusional grandeur. Nevertheless – despite minor deficiencies and insignificant limitations somewhat inherent to the genre – the album in general is a collection of beautiful, gracious and sensible songs, that exhibits a relevant level of professionalism and originality; if on one hand the album do not impress that much, on the other, also do not disappoint either. 

In a general evaluation, Transmission Zero – the album – is a lucid, proverbial, introspective and elegantly harmonious musical work, that deserves to be appreciated. Undoubtedly, it's a very promising beginning, for a band that has what it takes to fully succeed in the underground scene. 



Wagner

noise / dark ambient / experimental

bandcamp

electronic

dSound In Silence

progressive / metal / black metal

heavy metal / thrash metal

downtempo / electronic / post rock / shoegaze

facebook

psychedelic / doom

sludge / black metal

ambient / modern classical / experimental

bandcamp

drone / doom / noise / experimental

ambient / electronic

noise rock

stoner rock / grunge / alternative rock

facebook

​Serge

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