 | This article has multiple issues. Please help to improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page . (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
Species Being is an improvisational progressive rock band from the San Francisco Bay Area. They are considered[ by whom? ] one of the forefathers of improv progressive music. The band originally operated from 1997 to 2002, but took a fifteen-year hiatus, before signing with Rhubarb Palace Music.
The band was started in 1997 by drummer Frank Grau (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum). The original line up consisted largely of musicians from the local space-rock group Beyond-O-Matic and other local psych-rock and jazz musicians. In 1998 the line up changed considerably, turning into a quartet featuring Mike DiPirro on bass (Free Peoples, Soulstice, Radioactive), Jai Young Kim on keyboards (Secret Chiefs 3), and guitarist Eli Good (Grassy Knoll). After the departure of DiPirro in 1999, Species Being included several new musicians to its rotating line up including bassist Kenseth Thibideau (Pinback), guitarist Mitch Cheney (Rumah Sakit), composer/keyboardist Graham Connah, and bassist Matt Lebofsky (Secret Chiefs 3, MoeTar, miRthkon). This rotation of members stuck with the band until their break up in 2002.
The group reunited as a trio in 2017. The current line up consists of Matt Lebofsky, Jai young Kim and Frank Grau. Several releases through Rhubarb Palace Music are pending. [1]
Species Being self-released its debut Yonilicious in 1998. This album is a series of 11 vignettes strewn together to make a whimsical and wild pastiche of out-rock. Stylistically reminiscent of Soft Machine, Univers Zero, and other out-rock groups, this record was distributed in the UK by ReR Megacorp, by Marquee in Japan, and through other outlets across the U.S. and Europe.
Species Being's second record, Orgone Therapy, was released in 2000 on the now defunct Innerspace Records. Much like its predecessor, it is a collage of material taken from recording sessions, this time at the Radical House studio in San Francisco. It is entirely improvised with no overdubs and instead of an out-rock style, Orgone Therapy is far more progressive rock in its approach. [2] In 2007, former member Mitch Cheney produced a benefit CD for Children's Musical Education in St. Augustine, Florida entitled Greenness. Included on this CD is an unreleased Species Being track entitled 'Even Crappy Things Must Come To An End'. This track was taken from a live performance on WFMU 2000.
Quasar: Selections from 1997-2002 is a compilation of songs from Yonilicious and Orgone Therapy and previously unreleased material. It is the debut release for Species Being on Rhubarb Palace Music and will be available June 2017. [3]
Orgone is a pseudoscientific concept variously described as an esoteric energy or hypothetical universal life force. Originally proposed in the 1930s by Wilhelm Reich, and developed by Reich's student Charles Kelley after Reich's death in 1957, orgone was conceived as the anti-entropic principle of the universe, a creative substratum in all of nature comparable to Mesmer's animal magnetism (1779), to the Odic force (1845) of Carl Reichenbach and to Henri Bergson's élan vital (1907). Orgone was seen as a massless, omnipresent substance, similar to luminiferous aether, but more closely associated with living energy than with inert matter. It could allegedly coalesce to create organization on all scales, from the smallest microscopic units—called "bions" in orgone theory—to macroscopic structures like organisms, clouds, or even galaxies.
Jazz fusion is a music genre that developed in the late 1960s when musicians combined jazz harmony and improvisation with rock music, funk, and rhythm and blues. Electric guitars, amplifiers, and keyboards that were popular in rock and roll started to be used by jazz musicians, particularly those who had grown up listening to rock and roll.
J-Tull Dot Com is the 20th studio album by the British band Jethro Tull, released in 1999 on Papillon, the Chrysalis Group's late 1990s heritage record label. It was released four years after their 1995 album Roots to Branches and continues in the same vein, marrying hard rock with Eastern music influences. It is the first album to feature both Andrew Giddings on keyboards and Jonathan Noyce on bass, who would remain with the band until 2007, resulting in Jethro Tull's longest ever unchanged line-up. As of 2021, this is the last Jethro Tull album to feature all original, new material, although the band did release a Christmas album in 2003, which contained a mixture of new material, re-recordings of Tull's own suitably themed material and arrangements of traditional Christmas music.
Mitch Ryder is an American musician who has recorded more than 25 albums over more than four decades.
Signify is the fourth studio album by British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree. It was released in September 1996 and later re-released in 2003 with a second disc of demos, which had previously been released on the b-side cassette tape Insignificance, and a third time, on vinyl, on 9 May 2011. It was the first album that frontman Steven Wilson recorded with the band on board from the beginning; previous albums had been essentially solo efforts with occasional help from other musicians.
Stupid Dream is the fifth studio album by British progressive rock band Porcupine Tree. It was first released in March 1999, and then re-released on 15 May 2006 due to the band's rising popularity on major record label Lava Records with their releases of In Absentia in 2002 and Deadwing in 2005. The album, along with Lightbulb Sun in 2000, represented a transitional period for the band, moving away from the band's earlier work in instrumental and psychedelic music, but before they took a more metal direction in 2002 onwards. The album takes a commercially accessible pop rock sound while still retaining heavy progressive rock influences.
No-Man are an English art pop duo, formed in 1987 as No Man Is an Island by singer Tim Bowness and multi-instrumentalist Steven Wilson. The band has so far produced seven studio albums and a number of singles/outtakes collections. The band was once lauded as "conceivably the most important English group since The Smiths" by Melody Maker music newspaper, and a 2017 article of Drowned in Sound described them as "probably the most underrated band of the last 25 years".
Tatsuya Yoshida is a Japanese musician; drummer and composer who is the only consistent member of the renowned progressive rock duo Ruins, as well as of Koenji Hyakkei. He is also a member of the progressive rock trios Korekyojinn and Daimonji. Outside his own groups, Yoshida is renowned for his tenure as drummer in the indie progressive group YBO2, a band also featuring guitarist KK Null, whom he also joins in the current line-up of Zeni Geva and he has played drums in a late edition of Samla Mammas Manna. He has been cited as "[the] indisputable master drummer of the Japanese underground".
Steeler was an early 1980s American heavy metal band best known for featuring Swedish guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen upon his arrival in the United States. The band was founded in 1981 in Nashville, Tennessee by vocalist Ron Keel and released a sole album on Shrapnel Records in 1983 before morphing into Keel.
Sweep the Leg Johnny was an American experimental rock band formed in 1996. The name is a reference to a line in the film The Karate Kid.
Dactylis Glomerata is the sixth studio album by Swedish doom metal band Candlemass, released in 1998. This was their first album released since their split in 1994.
Fyfe Alexander Ewing, is best known as the original drummer and founding member of rock band Therapy?.
Karnataka are a Welsh progressive rock band formed in 1997 by Ian Jones, Jonathan Edwards (keyboards) and Rachel Jones (vocals). The band started as a project to record songs in Ian's home studio, that had been written and performed by Jonathan, Rachel and Ian in earlier bands. The project was augmented by additional musicians, Paul Davies and Gavin Griffiths (drums), who had played with other members of Karnataka in earlier bands. At the end of the recording the decision was made to continue the project as a band. The name Karnataka was chosen by the band, from a suggestion by Ian, following his trips to that state of India.
Mark Laff is a retired English rock drummer, and former member of several rock bands, including Generation X.
Os Paralamas do Sucesso is a Brazilian rock band, formed in Seropédica, Rio de Janeiro, in the late 1970s. Its members since 1982 are Herbert Vianna, Bi Ribeiro (bass), and João Barone (drums). In its beginning, the band combined reggae and ska with rock, but later added horn arrangements and Latin rhythms.
Little Tragedies are a Russian language progressive rock, art rock and symphonic rock band from Russia. Arguably the most important progressive rock band in Russia.
Mitch Malloy is an American singer. As of 2021, he is the lead vocalist for the rock band Great White.
The Paper Scissors were an Australian rock band that existed between 2005 and 2012. The last lineup consisted of Jai Pyne, Xavier Naughton and Ivan Lisyak. Their sound was described as "a combination of garage-punk, rock and soul". Australian music site Polaroids of Androids described them as "undoubtedly one of Sydney's finest bands of the past decade"
Therapy is the debut studio album by English musician Jim Lea, best known as the former bassist and songwriter of the British rock band Slade. Although Therapy is Lea's first solo album, he had previously released material as singles under various pseudonyms since the early 1980s.
miRthkon was an American avant-rock group based in Oakland, California founded by guitarist/vocalist/composer Wally Scharold. In addition to several album releases, they have also had a song featured in the video game Tap Tap Revenge. Their song "QXP-13 Space Modulator" was recreated in Guitar Hero Van Halen using the in-game song editor, GHTracks.
