NO TENGAS MIEDO

This must be one of the best efforts I have heard at merging classical music composition style (or perhaps one might say, movie soundtrack composition style) and Prog-Rock.

KFK is the project of Spanish composer and drummer Javi Herrera and its inception dates back to 25 years ago when a lady friend told him of her fear of darkness and her overcoming it, and it turned into a story about a mythological opaque world inhabited by two ladies, Dama and her daughter Adah, where Adah's curiosity and intransigence leads to the revealing of light and colour. Javi has been busy 25 years composing the music and the last 7 recording it, so it's anything but a hurried work.

I often get disappointed with modern one-man efforts but this is completely different. Javi has recruited a vast number of guest musicians, many of them playing orchestral instruments with plenty of violin, viola, cello, flute, oboe, English horn, clarinet and Spanish guitar, and he himself is an accomplished drummer and there is a lot of grand piano too, so we get a very warm and organic sound, nothing to do with those cold DAW-VST Instruments-made albums. He also understands how subtle tempo cadences are required to create emotion, and the album is full of them, we get nothing of the click-track-feel which permeates many modern Prog works (and often one-man albums in particular).

It's an instrumental album, and a sign of its value is that it's hard to name clear influences. Perhaps The Enid, After Crying and some Anthony Phillips come to mind because of the classical instrumentation, but the compositions are quite different.

It's all very cinematic, highly dynamic, visual and emotional, Javi has a great command of the different chord forms combinations and sounds to create atmospheres and moods, very much in movie soundtrack style but with the Prog-Rock ingredients thrown in the mix for our delight. The guest musicians provide some highly emotional passages, mostly the violins and flutes notwithstanding the others such as the oboe, the English horn, the viola or the Spanish guitar.

The 5 tracks are long (7m44 the shortest), and it's difficult to name highlights since all of it is so good. Most of the music is composed in classical music (or soundtrack) style, thinking not about typical progressions/melodies/verses/choruses/solos, but about an emotive interplay between the different orchestral instruments creating a dynamic story, but now and then the electric rock section comes in throwing a welcome dose of energy, often with jazzy colours and otherwise with more clear Prog-Rock leanings such as Camel and a few bits of harder rock.

I can only say that I'm very impressed by this excellent album, this is music in pure form. Just one warning, Prog-Metal / Tech-Extreme fans stay away from it unless you want to learn about something completely different.