The State of the Blog 2 October 2010

Hello and welcome to our first October State of the Blog report, fuelled today by Gatorade and Rum.  Don’t knock it till you try it.

September ended up by far the busiest month in the blog’s history, and frighteningly had almost as many posts in it as the entire year of 2009.  Yes, 2009 was a crap year for posting, but there you have it.  Heck of a month, September 2010…102 posts, the release of Opeth’s career-spanning live DVD/CD boxed set, and a drummer leaving a major prog metal band.  For the entire month of September, we had (looks at numbers) over 7000 visits (7166 to be exact) and over 10000 page views.  To say I am absolutely gobsmacked by these numbers is an understanding of epic proportions.  Looking at stuff like that, it makes me more motivated to keep things going (not that I needed it, mind).  Thank you so much for enjoying the effort I have put into making this blog as successful as it has been.

There’s more coming in October, of course…I will not tip my hand, but so much more heading your way.  I’m working on a few major interviews (fingers crossed!), there’s a ton of great CD reviews coming, and all the stuff you’ve come to expect here.  I have a ton of Magma stuff for Magma Monday (finally dug the rest of my discs out of boxes, so a good bit of the Akt Records discog is in hand now again!), some great symph and metal and avant CDs sitting in my pile to be reviewed, and so on.  A half dozen interviews completed and ready to share.  Concert reviews…so much proggy goodness.  At times I want to post it all right away, but then I’d have no backlog ;-)

Last week I shared a top 10 list of overall pages viewed…this week our top 10 is the top 10 accessed CD reviews to date…


1 Steve Morse/Sarah Spencer – Angelfire
2 Frogg Café – Bateless Edge
3 Hawkwind – Blood of the Earth
4 Opeth – Live in Concert at the Royal Albert Hall
5 Jose Carballido – Requiem
6 Edensong – Echoes of Edensong
7 American Hollow – Whisper Campaign
8 Trey Gunn – Modulator
9 Renaissance – The Mystic and the Muse
10 Eloy – Visionary


And as has become tradition of late, my listening list…


Shadow Gallery – Whispers and Screams
Canvas Solaris – Irradiance
Delain – Lucidity
Soft Machine – Drop
Electric Sorcery – II
Enslaved – Axioma Ethica Odini
Enslaved – Vertebrae
Enslaved – Ruun
White Willow – Ignis Fatuus
Half Past Four – Rabbit in the Vestibule
19 A.D.D. – Dead River
Magma – Les Voix

Vacuum Tube Head - Thirteen!


Going to be away most of the weekend, I wager…but a regular week ahead without worry.

Take care, have fun, prog out!  See you on Magma Monday!

The State of the Blog, 28 August 2010

Saturday, here on the blog, I think it was the…28th of August?

No, that doesn’t flow. At all.

Anyway. Carrying on.

It’s State of the Blog day, and for a change I actually have a few things of import to impart to you. Much of this will be dealing with posting schedules the coming week, but there’s some other odds and sods tossed in for good measure as well. Buckle in…while I won’t promise that there’ll be no turbulence, I will do my best to make the ride as smooth as possible.

First, and most important in this case…posting schedules. Next weekend is Labour Day weekend here in the States, and I will be away starting Friday and running through the Monday following. While there’ll be no impact on the regular week posting coming up, there’ll actually be no Saturday posts next week (I can hear that sigh of relief out there), and there is a possibility that Magma Monday will either be extremely late, or postponed in its entirety, depending on when I return from a weekend away. I am hopeful that the worst case scenario is another photo gallery, but fair warning is fair warning. As mentioned, the rest of the week’s posting should be unaffected.

I have a lot of interviews coming up…one thing I have done is post a list on the interviews archive page of the ones that are in the works (so go there and look!). I usually hate doing stuff like this because it will come back to bite me on the arse, but I’m taking the risk. In any event, it is very likely that I will be moving to a twice weekly interview schedule simply to keep things flowing. This won’t affect anything like CD reviews, which seem to be stuck on a 3 times a week posting thing right now…I just don’t want the interviews sitting around. There’s already one or two that have sat way too long as it is.

Speaking of stuff like this…I don’t know if you’ve ever clicked on the little triangles that open up past month and year post archives, but if you did, you’ll notice that this month has been the highest post count month since this blog started. That’s not saying much in some ways, considering how often I’ve let things lie fallow, but still…lots of posts. Part of that is down to you…your enthusiasm and energy (in comments on posts, e-mails, comments on other forums) encourages me to continue. So as usual, thanks. You keep me doing this.

Continuing on the enthusiasm thread for a second…the polls. Right now with 3 days left, we’re over 125 votes on the poll, and that blows me away. I didn’t pay much attention on the first poll, mostly because people were allowed to vote for more than one choice, but I believe we had around 45 to 50 total responses with 87 total votes or something like that. Again…thank you for your response to the poll. I’ll make sure the next one goes up faster than this one did!

Monday this week is Magma Monday, as usual. I’ve got something special and a little different planned…I am not going to say what it is, you’ll just have to pop over and check it out Monday.

Before wrapping up this little news post, I’ll offer up something a little different…a list of the stuff I’ve been listening to the past week or so. Most of this you’ll see on the blog in one form or another, so consider this a teaser…


American Hollow – Whisper Campaign
Mehran – Angels of Persepolis
Glass Harp – Live at the Beachland Ballroom 11.01.08
Goldbug – The Seven Dreams
TM + MR – Descending
Matt Stevens – Ghost
Heavy Glow – The Filth and the Fury
19 A.D.D. – Dead River
TANGENTS – A Little Light Year
Also Eden – Differences as Light
Jose Carballido – Requiem


OK, time to get to work at the job that allows me to do this for you. I’ve got a long weekend of music and writing to get to later.

See you all on Monday!

Now Listening to 1st week June 2009

As we rev things back up, here's a taste of what I have been listening to:

IQ - Frequency. The new album. Expect a review post tomorrow.
Taylor's Universe - Return to Whatever. Expect a review by the end of the week.
UFO - The Visitor. I should be reviewing this next week.
Magnum - Into the Valley of the Moon King
Oceansize - Frames (US edition w/DVD)

All this and more to be covered soon.

And this year may well be the year of the live blog from NEARfest...details to follow!

In the queue...

As I have done in the past, here's a sampling of what I have been listening to, and what's up next. You may get to hear my thoughts on some of this, so use this as potential teasers for future content...

Marvin Ayres - Eccentric Deliquescence
Oxygene8 - Freak of Chance
The Lizards - Archeology
Days Between Stations - s/t debut release
The Red Masque - Fossileyes
Proto-Kaw - Before Became After
Proto-Kaw - The Wait of Glory
The Enid - In The Region of the Summer Stars
The Enid - Aerie Faerie Nonsense

Some Updates/Blog News

I wanted to make a quick post, after a long weekend, to update you, Constant Readers, with an idea of what will be coming this week and in weeks to follow.

I had made brief mention of an idea for a regular interview feature. This is definitively a go. I have contacted a number of musicians, all of whom have expressed interest in participating. This will be in an abbreviated, '10 questions with' type format. I've already got the following people lined up for interviews in the coming weeks:

Dave Kerman (Thinking Plague/Present/5UUs/et cetera)
Cyndee Lee Rule (solo artist, has played with Nik Turner, Harvey Bainbridge, Systems Theory)
Lynnette Shelley (The Red Masque)
Matthew Parmenter (discipline.)
Bill Berends (Mastermind)
Gary Lauzon (The Rebel Wheel)

Alan Benjamin (Advent)
Frank Camiola (Cardboard Amanda/Frogg Cafe)
Graeme Murray (Pallas)

There's several other people I am waiting on response from, so rather than tease names that might not come to pass, I'll leave you with that tantalizing list.

I still have several albums and DVDs that I plan on covering for you all soon...I've not forgotten about them. Expect the Spock's Beard and Marillion live DVD reviews soon. I'm also going to be taking a look at Robin Taylor's newest group, Art Cinema (which I posted about HERE).

And as a final update, here's what I've been treating my ears to the past few days...

Premiata Forneira Marconi - Per un Amico
Premiata Forneria Marconi - Storia di un Minuto
Renaissance - Prologue
Renaissance - Ashes are Burning
Renaissance - Scheherazade and Other Stories
Magma - 1001 Degrees Centigrades
Magma - Kohntarkosz
UK - UK
UK - Danger Money
Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso - Da qui messere si domina la valle

What have YOU been listening to?