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This week featuring Aoife O'Donovan
Mirror to the Sky is the twenty-third studio album by English progressive rock band Yes, released on 19 May 2023 by InsideOut Music and Sony Music.[2] It is their first studio album with American drummer Jay Schellen as a full-time member following the death of long-time Yes drummer Alan White in 2022, and to whom the album is dedicated.[3]
Yes started work on the album shortly before the release of The Quest, their previous album, in October 2021. Like its predecessor, guitarist Steve Howe resumed his role as producer on Mirror to the Sky and the FAMES Orchestra in North Macedonia provide orchestral arrangements by Paul K. Joyce on some songs.
Yes – Mirror To The Sky: "the best Yes album in more than 20 years"
No Jon Anderson, Chris Squire or Alan White? No problem for Yes. Prog’s great survivors hit a late-career upswing on Mirror To The Sky
With every studio recording, live album or tour announcement, there’s always a faction of fans who will turn up on a corner of the internet waving their ‘No Jon Anderson, No Yes’ banners. Their zeal is only matched by the nearby counter-demonstration shaking their ‘No Peter Banks, No Yes’ placards.
But time and events have moved on and maybe the ‘No Anderson’ contingent should too. In the aftermath of the singer’s unceremonious departure 15 years ago, we’ve since lost Chris Squire and Alan White, a stark reminder, should it be needed, that life is really too short to spend time grinding gears over something we have no control over. Rather than exercising well-worn prejudices and allowing expectations to become self-fulfilling prophecies, isn’t it better to approach a new album with an open mind?
If 2021’s The Quest represented a return to some kind of form after the bland torpor of 2014’s Heaven & Earth, Mirror To The Sky feels like another useful step forward in Yes’ apparently never-ending story. There’s a good reason they released Cut From The Stars as a digital single ahead of the album: it has more hooks in it than an angler’s bag. With a cascading string motif; vibrant rays of organ; spiky, undulating bass; bubbling guitars; dead-ahead drumming and ecstatic skipping vocals, it moves with determined energy and purpose. Setting out the stall of a band that have now been fully rejuvenated with the installation of drummer Jay Schellen, it’s a track that has urgency and power in abundance. Or, to put it another way, it fucking rocks.
Those catchy qualities continue with All Connected – its expansive feel seamlessly unrolls from one section to another, making the musical connectivity work with consummate ease. While taking disparate elements and welding them into something functional and cohesive is pretty much what Yes are best known for, there’s an argument that it’s not been done as elegantly as this for quite some time. If the chorus of Luminosity sounds, at times, like it might have been rejected by the local Christian Fellowship for being too happy-clappy, it’s at least bookended with an engagingly upbeat arrangement. The same cannot be said for the plodding dreariness of Living Out Their Dream, an unimaginative rocker whose by-the-numbers presence here is baffling.
That lapse of judgement is mercifully brief and the title track restores momentum. The piece showcases orchestral embellishments by Paul K Joyce, whose work also graced The Quest. Mid-tempo rather than magisterial, it nevertheless works well, with ethereal violin harmonics adding a chilly trail in the wake of Howe’s contemplative fretwork. The guitarist’s soloing throughout the track is especially good. At 75 years old he might have slowed down in comparison to the flash of his youth, but he demonstrates the wisdom of knowing that, in this case, a leaner, cleaner melodicism will serve the song all the better. As principal soloist and producer, Howe is ultimately free to overdub as many guitars onto a track as he sees fit without fear of anyone telling him otherwise, yet here he opts for a restrained approach that benefits the album overall.
Yes’ internecine politics in the past have sometimes reduced the album-making process into a passive-aggressive grudge match, wherein the band are only able to work at the speed of the unhappiest member. By contrast, this line-up has publicly stated that the spirit of cooperation and mutual support evident during The Quest has continued to flourish. Though it’s hard to objectively quantify, there’s a sense that everyone being on the same page has brought optimism and coherence to the music. Jon Davison’s charming ballad Circles Of Time, which gently closes the album, though delicate on the surface, comes with a real inner strength that’s due to the simplicity of its arrangement and uncluttered sureness of its production.
As with The Quest, this album also comes with a three-track bonus disc. The best of these is the middling Unknown Place. With its Hammond organ wig-out and solo cowbell section it seems designed to provide some clap-along crowd participation when Yes next get back on the road.
The long tail of Yes’ inventiveness during the 1970s burns so intensely to this day that it’s inevitable that the current band will likely always be judged against those past glories. While Mirror To The Sky doesn’t scale those early innovative heights and is unlikely to change the musical weather in the way the band once did, when judged on its own merits, this is a set that stands as the best Yes album in more than 20 years. Maybe it’s time to put down the placards and listen.
A few weeks ago we featured a live 1974 recording of DSotM; tonight we spotlight the 50th Anniversary remastered recording of the original release.
The Dark Side of the Moon 50th Anniversary is a box set reissue of British progressive rock band Pink Floyd's original 1973 album. It was released on 24 March 2023 by Pink Floyd Records. Five digital-only singles were released to support the set.
The Dark Side of the Moon is the eighth studio album by the English rock band Pink Floyd, released on 1 March 1973 by Harvest Records. Developed during live performances before recording began, it was conceived as a concept album that would focus on the pressures faced by the band during their arduous lifestyle, and also deal with the mental health problems of former band member Syd Barrett, who departed the group in 1968. New material was recorded in two sessions in 1972 and 1973 at EMI Studios (now Abbey Road Studios) in London.
The record builds on ideas explored in Pink Floyd's earlier recordings and performances, while omitting the extended instrumentals that characterised the band's earlier work. The group employed multitrack recording, tape loops, and analogue synthesisers, including experimentation with the EMS VCS 3 and a Synthi A. Engineer Alan Parsons was responsible for many of the sonic aspects of the recording, and for the recruitment of session singer Clare Torry, who appears on "The Great Gig in the Sky".
The Dark Side of the Moon explores themes such as conflict, greed, time, death and mental illness. Snippets from interviews with the band's road crew and others are featured alongside philosophical quotations. The sleeve, which depicts a prismatic spectrum, was designed by Storm Thorgerson in response to keyboardist Richard Wright's request for a "simple and bold" design which would represent the band's lighting and the album's themes. The album was promoted with two singles, "Money" and "Us and Them".
The Dark Side of the Moon is among the most critically acclaimed albums and often features in professional listings of the greatest of all time. It brought Pink Floyd international fame, wealth and plaudits to all four band members. A blockbuster release of the album era, it also propelled record sales throughout the music industry during the 1970s. The Dark Side of the Moon is certified 14 times platinum in the United Kingdom, and topped the US Billboard Top LPs & Tape chart, where it has charted for 981 weeks. As of 2013, The Dark Side of the Moon has sold over 45 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling album of the 1970s and the fourth-best-selling album in history.[4] In 2012, the album was selected for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
credits
Michael Bonaventure (b. 1962, Edinburgh), composer, organist and collaborator in new and experimental music projects; based in Edinburgh & Amsterdam.
In recent times he has been producing work in the Dark Ambient field of electronica, as exemplified in the CD album In Tenebris Ratione Organi, released in 2019 by Eighth Tower Records. An earlier survey of his electronic & organ music, Works 2008 - 2017, was released on the Unexplained Sounds Group label in 2017, and in 2020 he co-created with the Italian guitarist & synthesiser musician Loo(p)cy (Lucia Caiazza) a new album entitled Across The Blood, released digitally in October 2020. Most recently he has formed a duo,’PNEUMA’, with the Scottish-based flautist, composer & improviser Richard Craig in which a new dimension of artistic practice is being explored through the synergy of flute, organ and amplified sounds in new compositions, improvisation and the adaptation of existing repertoire. Bonaventure’s own sonic universe derives its inspiration from mysticism and ritual, natural and imaginary worlds, astronomical and supernatural phenomena; much of his work is rooted in a personal kind of ‘adapted minimalism’ and in improvisation.
Recent works are: Omega (2023) for organ & fixed media, Prayer & Exaltation (2022) for organ, Odd, Even & December Union (2021) for music box, both written for Joseph Kudirka; Mavisbank (2021), an electronic track created for Hauntology in the UK, a CD album released in December 2021 by Eighth Tower Records; The Land Of Silence (2021), a setting of Ernest Dowson’s poem “Beata Solitudo” for soprano, live electronics & organ, premiered in Montréal in May 2021 by Kimberley Lynch & Adrian Foster; an adaptation of Giant Silver (a track from In Tenebris Ratione Organi) with new material for organ, premiered by Lauren Redhead & Alistair Zaldua at the BBC Tectonics Festival in Glasgow in 2021; and Giant Glass Green (2020), an electronic work commissioned by Earth World Collaborative and funded by Canada Council for the Arts. A number of his electronic works have been used in video art created by the Dutch-based artist Thomas Mohr and shown at various film/video art festivals in Europe in recent years, including at Berlin Atonal.
His music has been played in Canada, USA, Russia, UK, New Zealand, France, Spain, Germany, Belgium & The Netherlands as well as on BBC Radio 3, Concertzender (Netherlands), Radio Onda Rossa (Italy) and Resonance Extra FM.
As an organ soloist (with and without electronics) Bonaventure is also a seasoned interpreter of new & experimental music, with innumerable composer collaborations since the early 1980s. To date he has given over 200 premières and concertized in churches, cathedrals, universities and at festivals throughout the UK, in Europe & USA, on BBC Radio 3 & Radio Scotland, and on 7 solo CDs. These include four volumes of ‘Contemporary British Organ Music’ on the sfz label and the later organ cycles of Olivier Messiaen for Delphian Records, including a widely-acclaimed rendition of the massive Livre du Saint Sacrement, released in 2008.
Published by Unexplained Sounds Group
Music by Michael Bonaventure
Mastering by Raffaele Pezzella (a.k.a. Sonologyst)
Artwork by Christian Voyce
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