It's the end of 2007, a day like any other. In the CD player of Johnny Wilks, responsible sales&marketing of the London label Snapper Music, plays the demo of a new album: it is “Tightly Unwound”, the seventh by the British band Pineapple Thief. It was Steven Wilson, leader of Porcupine Tree and the label's workhorse, who recommended listening to it. The album is valid, very valid, and seems perfect for taking a step that has been taking shape in Wilks' mind for a while: creating a space that can act as a home for other projects at the border between pop, progressive, independent music and experimentation. The design revolves around a name, “Kscope”, a contraction of “kaleidoscope” (and at the same time a reference to the seventies label K-Tel), chosen in 1999 by Steven Wilson as a brand to mark his projects within Snapper Music.
Wilks hunts down his colleague Tony Harris in the kitchenette attached to the office and explains the idea to him; shortly after, the two are from managing director Fred Jude to present the project, which is enthusiastically approved. “Tightly Unwound” was announced in February 2008 on the newly formed label's website.
There press release initial states that in the years immediately preceding “an ever-wider movement of formations began to strip progressive rock of its excesses and clichés, re-establishing its initial desire to experiment with eclectic musical sources and multiple sonic possibilities, to be able to create something that has meaning here and now”. He then mentions a very diverse range of artists who exemplify this trend: Porcupine Tree, Radiohead, Amplifier, Oceansize, Muse, Opeth, Mars Volta in the “nu-prog” and prog-metal fields, but also Sigur Rós, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Tortoise in post-rock territory, Rain Tree Crow, No-Man and Air as standard bearers of “ambient-prog”, Lewis Taylor (“soul prog”) and even Neon Neon and Dälek (“prog-hop”).
It is Tim Bowness of No-Man, associated with the Kscope brand since the re-release of “Flowermouth” in 2005, who proposed the expression that will be the project's calling card from the beginning: “post-progressive sounds”. An effective way – and almost antithetical to “neoprog” – to indicate music which, coming from stylistic paths that are very distant from the commonly understood progressive rock, shares with the latter the aptitude for the construction of changing atmospheres, for the dialogue between song and research, for instrumental textures with a strongly evocative character.
Over the years, with the expansion of the catalog and the influence of sound Kscope on emerging artists, the category of post-prog would have established itself as a key to understanding both for enthusiasts and journalists. Kscope would become the reference name of the scene and, while maintaining a very diversified proposal, its own imprinting it would have become more evident.
This compilation aims to attempt a synthesis and at the same time a journey through the multiple souls of the label. They range from the projects most visibly linked to Porcupine Tree (Steven Wilson, Pineapple Thief, No-Man, Blackfield) to the “escape from metal” trajectories of artists such as Lunatic Soul (one-man band by Mariusz Duda of Riverside), Katatonia, Anathema, Ulver, also crossing into synth-pop with The Receiver or Envy Of None (latest creation of Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson).
Whether it's debut artists or old glories (Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull and Paul Draper of Mansun are both at the label), some common threads emerge easily: the remarkable dynamic range that characterizes the songwriting by Steven Wilson is also found in artists who range in the same song from acoustic rock to metallic distortions; The drumming “expanded” by Gavin Harrison seems the model of many rhythmic joints, discreet but enveloping; the atmospheric system of Richard Barbieri's keyboard playing also echoes in the Italian Nosound, in mood suspended of the folkish Se Delan and in the stratifications of many others.
Here and there, the marked search for a captivating but delicate expressiveness borders on the pretentious; sometimes perhaps even in the monotonous. Overall, however, it is above all the personality that emerges, with artists such as Gazpacho, Gleb Kolyadin (keyboardist of the Russian band Iamthemorning) and the paladinsdjent Tesseract which manage to be as grandiloquent and surprising as the symphonic prog of times gone by, even without directly recalling it from a sound point of view.
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Antonio Santini for SANREMO.FM
