"you should be listening to this on an old record player with flares, a long leather coat and , ideally, a polo neck and afro. "

progradar.org

PREORDER NOW!!!!

 

WELCOME to www.thetangent.org - internet home of the Progressive Rock band from Northern England/Sweden, Brighton, wherever anyone happens to live right now. We start with news of the band's forthcoming album......

 

"A SPARK IN THE AETHER"... April 2015!!! PREORDER NOW!!!!

FIRST REVIEW :

"Well, one thing, when (The Tangent) go back to doing what they do best, Progressive Rock, with the heavy emphasis on ‘Rock’, there are few to touch them. The insightful, humorous lyrics and excellent musicianship that have always been a cornerstone of this band are there in spades. ‘A Spark in the Aether’ has bucket loads of funk, jazz, prog and rock and is as essential a purchase as you can get this early in the musical year, gentlemen, I salute you!"

Written by Martin Hutchinson for his new site Progradar - you can find the full review there. http://www.progradar.org/

 

The new album with its classic Ed Unitsky sleeve will be the Eighth official studio release by the band now in its twelfth year of existence. It's gong to be available on CD, Download and DOUBLE VINYL album.....

Andy Tillison: "This is an album that seeks to return to the core of what The Tangent means to me... after our big orchestral opus that we delivered in "Le Sacre Du Travail" we're, to an extent, reining in the instrumentation to the 5 piece electric Prog Rock band and focussing a little more on that all-important second word of the genre name 'Rock'. At least (grins with less than average teeth) for the first half!"

Ian Oakley, long term friend of the band and former manager: " "This is my favourite Tangent album in years. Full of thoughtful and amusing lyrics, singalong melodies, uplifting choruses, great guitar and synth leads (and just wait till you hear the brass!) Real "Prog & Roll""

A.S.I.T.Æ. is not without its ambitious pieces though. The one "long" track The Celluloid Road (which occupies the whole of side 3 of the vinyl edition), is a nostalgic, wistful and humorous journey across the USA from coast to coast, using famous movies and TV programmes as the landmarks along the way. The group does expand into larger intrumentation here, this time into the world of brass sections which are used to evoke the atmospheres of shows and films like Kojak, Ironside, Dirty Harry, Shaft, Easy Rider, Thelma & Louise, Breaking Bad, Pulp Fiction, and more.

Dirty Harry. made in the same year as "Fragile" by Yes

 

The album, overall, has a somewhat familiar theme....

"I think there's an element of it being "The Music That Died Alone 2" smiles Andy. "A lot of the subject matter in the lyrics to the first few songs is revisiting the state of Progressive Rock 12 years after the original album was made. That's obviously been a big big change. There's no apparent sign of the music being dead at all... but I still feel we have dangers and that we're not out of the woods yet. We all have a part to play in the development of this genre and becoming stilted and over safe is not the way to play this game. We need to support the younger guys as much as possible."

The Musicians featured on the project are:

Andy Tillison Diskdrive: Keyboards & Vocals

Luke Machin: Guitar

Jonas Reingold: Bass Guitar

Theo Travis: Saxes & Flutes

Morgan Agren: Drums

 

There were no guest appearances after all - the band deciding to work in the classic 5 piece lineup.

The album is due for release on 20th April 2015 in Europe and 21st April 2015 in the US. 

NEW - THE ANDY TILLISON MULTIPLEX

A NEW SOLO PROJECT...

ELECTRIC SINFONIA No. TWO

 

And yhas recently finished a completely new project he's been working on in parallel with the Tangent's forthcoming release. Well... perhaps not completely new, as the title of the album suggests, it's a second piece in the series that began with "Le Sacre Du Travail" It's described as being a continuation of some of the musical ideas that he brought to "Sacre" but this time it is much more Jazz-Oriented and, for the most part it's instrumental.

In fact.. have listen!!

Andy: "The Tangent's always been a band that was made up of around 70 percent Prog with the rest being made up of various types of Jazz. During "Sacre" with the long format of that piece I found I was really enjoying working in that particular area. So I've been writing a sort of follow up to "Sacre" - but it's not a lyrical, conceptual or really even musical follow up. It's just a new long linked piece. And it's kinda like The Tangent except with those ratios I mentioned the other way around. It's got loads of influences from other favourite musicians that I've had to leave out of other Tangent stuff - artists like Chick Corea, Jacques Loussier, Bruford, Brand X and of course my beloved National Health. In fact, I was about half way through it and I suddenly though "it's a JAZZ ROCK album" - you know, I've been referring to this kind of stuff as 'fusion' for a long time and I just think that's a bit vague. It's kind of to not insult great musicians like Chick I guess. Anyway, I'm Andy Tillison, not Chick Corea, so you can call it Jazz Rock and I'll still be proud!"

The album is expected to be released on the 1st December of THIS year on CD with pre-ordering and advance listening available from 23 August!

 

 

 

T A N G E N T - B L O G

At long last the site has a blog. It's a fledgling right now, a place where Andy and others are going to be able to discuss things beyond news and releases. The Tangent and Po90 websites have always tried to be more than advertisements and news bulletins, so if you want to read a little deeper into what we are, do and think, well please make sure you visit, comment, take part in an exchange.

We've started off with some articles about the new album.

"The Spritual Atheist" looks at why a composer who is so devoid of belief in any God is writing an album that is based around something as vague and unquantifiable as "The Aether" or "Quintessence"

"Justification For Making Another Album.... when none of the others made me rich" is fairly self explanatory

"At The Sharp End Of A Legacy" is a look at how it feels to be continuing the work of legends, mostly without the support of those legends. If you enjoy the taste of very sour grapes, you'll enjoy this article

The blog is full of its own self importance, pretentious and overblown. There's a chance you'll enjoy it if you like the music to start with.

M A S C H I N E

Tangent guitarist Luke Machin and former bass player Dan Mash are of course predominantly members of the band Maschine (see what they did with their names there?) the band are one of a growing number of younger bands to display an enormous amount of reverence for Progressive Rock in their music. Now signed to the same label as the Tangent, Insideout Music, their debut album "Rubidium" was released last year, picking up some very healthy reviews and prompting some enthusiastic words from Steve Hillage no less.

At present they are "in the studio" working on a second album, and busy recovering from a successful tour with their label-mates Haken and Leprous. More details of course over at their site which you'll find here

 

 

New Video From The TANGENT!! The album release looms!

 

News Article from PROG Magazine - March 2015

 

OTHER NEWS

Andy Tillison and Sally Collyer have recently returned from a trip to the USA where Andy performed music by The Tangent and Po90 - and lectured at the University of Colorado on the subject of "Protest Songs in the Social Networking Era". The visit was a great success and the possibility of more such events has not been ruled out. The lecture included the first ever live performance of a small section of "Le Sacre Du Travail"....

Andy in "Professor" Mode

The venue at Colorado University

Andy, Sally and Prof Birzer of CU

"You Can't Take It With You"

 

The MULTIPLEX ALBUM

The latest solo album by Andy Tillison was released in December last year. It was a quietly released affair so be sure to catch up on it! - available in our shop... more info about this album further down the page.....

 

 

SOLO GIGS

A few solo gigs went off very nicely at the end of 2014 - at the CRS in Rotherham, at a local venue in Andy's home town of OTLEY and a very well receieved house concert at Tangent Towers which was broadcast LIVE with a small gathering of friends over Progzilla Progressive Rock Radio and presented by long term friend of the band Cliff Pearson. The archived show is still available here and features a couple of hours of live performance and interview interspersed with selections of tracks from "Multiplex" and the odd Rush track!!

The Progzilla live Radio Show from Andy & Sally's Living Room

 

The Tangent live in 2014

 

The Tangent in Holland, May 2014 - Photo by Christine Lenk

The Tangent & Karmakanic completed a short European tour during May 2014, taking in gigs across the North Western region and Scandanavia. The tour reached a peak with a headline slot at the Celebr8 festival in London UK. The gigs were enjoyable and well attended and more gigs by the two bands are on the cards for 2015.

Sadly, a recording for a DVD did not work out. The concert at the Boerderij in Zoertermeer, Holland, was filmed beautifully, but sadly, for technical reasons the audio was not recorded at all and the band were left with a "blank tape". Although silent movies can be very wonderful things in themselves, it doesn't really translate to a band DVD!

T O U R S H O T S 2 0 1 4

Celebr8 Festival- London UK

Onstage - Zoertermeer NL

Setup at Lidkoping SE

Team Talk - Lidkoping SE

Post Gig Euphoria - DE

Time Off - Lidkoping

On the Road DE

Formation back exercises SE

A Quiet Moment in UK

The results of alcohol

Currentus Percusionadi DE

T I L L I S O N - S T E V E N S

Two much discussed concerts (both at Celebr8 0ne in 2013 ond one in 2014) have featured a totally unrehearsed collaboration between Andy Tillison and the highly innovative guitarist Matt Stevens whose band "The Fierce & The Dead" are very popular on the Avant Prog scene

Matt Stevens

The two musicians made a point of not talking to each other about what they were going to do at the concerts, (going as far as actually not talking to each other at all at the second one until the gig began) in order to keep everything random and 'off the wall'.

Both gigs were very good natured, a lot of fun for musicans and audience alike and received very positive reviews.

In Spring 2014 they met up at Andy's studio in Yorkshire and "messed around for three days". The current status of the album they are making is "we'll leave it until we've forgotten what we were trying to do, then sort it out when we've forgotten what it was we were trying to forget."

Stevens/Tillison at Celebr8.3

The live shows included lengthy ambient improvisations, impromptu Steely Dan Covers, "Roll Over Beethoven" arranged for synthesiser and acoustic guitar, "Honky Tonk Train Blues" and several things that "we probably stole off Mahavishnu". Oh and "Popcorn" by Hot Butter.

The album has already been released in 3,439 Quantum Parallel Universes and in this universe we're still waiting.