Prog points

[greatbear]

This may or may not tag me as a 'musician'.

My 'ex', Kit Watkins, has just released his latest CD "SkyZone", a collection of ambient/experimental/meditative music previously unreleased on his other works. Included among the tracks is a piece that we did as a jam one night, "Harmonic Hum". This has me with a guitar, my ebow, lots of reverb along with Kit on keys and his new-at-the-time Yamaha fretless bass. The track resembles something Steve Roach might have come up with. Anyway, this one recording of us managed to find it's way out of the dustbin of obscurity and into a released CD. I forgot how flowing and dreamy the piece was.

I guess I really should dust off the axes here and try playing again. My increasingly stiff fingers keep telling me otherwise. Oh well. At least in terms of obscure progressive music, I have gained a point in street cred.

Go me!

(Kit's website is set to randomly play songs from SkyZone. "Harmonic Hum" is in the rotation. You can click the button on the upper right of the frame to turn off the music then turn it back on again, repeating the process until the track shows up. Better yet, leave it play, turn it up a bit, and relax.)

Comments

[michaelnolan.livejournal.com]

and of course the actual music wasn't credited.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

No, and in the case of the loops and samples, I believe there was supposed to be mentions but rarely are. He still gets trickles of royalties for various stuff.

[michaelnolan.livejournal.com]

He's always been underappreciated as far as I'm concerned.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Yep. Recently though, he did enjoy a resurgence of sorts. One, I convinced him to put his catalog out through mp3.com at the time, and Happy The Man reformed mostly from people's interest in the band as prog started making a comeback. Kit did not want to deal with the touring and whatnot, so stayed out of the HtM project. We did go and see the reformed band play at the State Theater in VA for their first live show in decades. They were tight! And that was by far the loudest concert I've been to.

He's got some more stuff coming down the pike.

[michaelnolan.livejournal.com]

I miss the MP3.com days.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I discovered tons of really great music from artists that would never find mainstream release. Even a lot of the 'garage bands' had chops and production values that far surpassed common mainstream music. A shame, really, especially since mp3.com was essentially taken over and sunk by major labels. Still, the cat was out of the bag, people began to look beyond major label cruft and go after independent music and artists. The popularity of iTunes and the fact that they carry independents brought that variety to the masses.

Vive la revolucion!

[michaelnolan.livejournal.com]

My radio show was in its heyday back then and I found TONS of my stuff there.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Not a day went by that I wasnt sampling something new and downloading stuff. I still have gigabytes of stuff from there. I wonder what happened to a lot of these bands. I should start picking through the goodies and see if there is new material to be found somewhere.

[michaelnolan.livejournal.com]

I lost gigs of stuff in a major crash in 2002. I've attempted to track down a few of the bands and artists but many of them are nowhere to be found.

Ironically, the wife of one of MP3.com's founders is a very good friend of mine.

[progbear.livejournal.com]

I saw the reformed HTM when they performed in Chapel Hill, NC. They were indeed tight! I found new keyboardist David Rosenthal quite talented, if rather slavishly imitative of Kit’s style. But then, if he’d deviated too far from that sound, he would have upset all the prog fanboys in the audience, so I guess you just can’t win. The new material from the then-still-unreleased The Muse Awakens sounded strikingly similar to the “classic” material.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

I chatted with David Rosenthal for a while after the show, and he said it took quite a bit of doing to learn Kit's style and parts to do the original material justice. It's so integrated into HtM's essence that if he tried to change it even slightly, it would wreck the sound. Even The Muse Awakens follows Kit's style to the point of being eerie. I'm not too sure if that's good or bad. Good in that HtM's sound is intact, but bad in that it has yet to evolve. Maybe in the next release.

It was neat to find Joe Bergamini taking over the drum duties. He's good IMO.