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Progressive Rock CD Reviews

Chris Ianuzzi Olga in a Black Hole Review by Gary Hill I am not convinced this fits under the progressive rock banner. I'm not sure where else it fits, though. It's instrumental. It's electronic and definitely weird. It's artistic, but perhaps not art rock because there is no rock music here. This is often spacey. It's also challenging, but cool. This review is available in book (paperback and hardcover) in Music Street Journal: 2020 Volume 2. More information and purchase links can be found at: garyhillauthor.com/Music-Street-Journal-2020.

Track by Track Review

Olga in a Black Hole Trippy, spacey ambience opens this cut. The track gradually begins to build upward from there. It doesn't rise up to anything particular cohesive or rocking though. Instead rhythmic elements are merge with weird pulses and bit of synthetic keyboards to create a trippy, artsy, spacey sort of jam. That eventually peaks and drops away as the cut approaches the half-way point of its nine-minute-plus run. It starts to develop from more atmospheric weirdness from there in quite spacey and science fiction based ways. It eventually rises up in terms of volume and intensity, but never coalesces beyond the level of spacey strangeness.

Hello Computerized sounds brings this into being. It grows outward with bleep, pops and other robotic elements merged with percussive textures. Some keyboard notes come in at times. This really feels a lot like the kind of music robots might groove to it. There is a synthetic "hello" heard here and there. Later in the track some chants are heard in an almost ritualistic way.

Fork This has a noisier presence for a lot of its duration. Weird electronics are the basis for this piece, like the rest. This feels a bit more driving than the other two cuts. It's definitely more percussive. It's no less strange, but the intensity level is definitely ramped up quite a bit.

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