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

[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.