ASIA MINOR

A group of Turkey with a turkish accent singer singing in English in 1980, does not seem very attractive. If we add that initially sounds like a good copy of Camel, better let go.

Big mistake! No one should lose these 34 glorious minutes in the history of our beloved progressive path. Between Flesh and Divine is a treasure that deserves to be unearthed.

Some bands have edited hours and hours of music, and do not reach the magnificence of this work impeccable, just over half an hour. I enjoy this cd for 15 years thanks to the reissue of Musea Records, unmissable.

Highlights? Everything, every song, every instrument. Voices not detract from this work, and flutes are outstanding.

Well I'll be damned!

Wow, just before the coming of 2013 I step upon this album, which to me from the exterior, seemed obscure but ultimately unattractive. Once again my poor judgement tricked me again, I discovered another treasure...that many discovered before me it seems!

Asia Minor is serving us a delicate album, with contrasts of nightly atmospheres to bright light to more tormented segments. I always thought 'darker' progressive rock is the best, with King Crimson in lead. Well, this band is giving us a good serve of 'dark' music but sprinkled with tasteful flute, energetic and clever drums, Robert Smith guitars and silky smooth keyboards...yummers!

The inevitable Camel comparison is audible, but the band is clearly showing it's true colors most of the time with their moody and eerie sound, a perfect album for a snowstorm. I frankly thought of Solaris with their Martian Chronicles as the first influence, but...wait! This record was made 3 years before Solaris! If you appreciate this band, check out for Singularity as their nowadays counterparts...oh and why not Eloy at the same time!

Oh little album, you maybe have an ugly exterior, but your heart is gold.

Contenders for best lost gems of all-time.

Top notch second album named Between flesh and divine from this Turkish-France band Asia Minor issued in 1981, and what an album this is for that period, really this kick ass all the way from start to finish. Imagine you listen to Camel in their most inventive period with some turkish influences, overtones that in the end fits perfectly in the symphonic prog atmosphere. This is a solid album that sets the standards from generations to come, specially as one of the reviewers said tht Asia Minor is the missing link between the symphonic bands of the golden age and the upcoming neo-prog wave. Very well played instrumental passages, there are more then with voice so only a joy for me and for my ears. Truly great album with melancholical voice. Strong pieces, all, no weak moments here. A gem of an album that needs attention from all serious prog listners. 4 stars easy, a fine cover art that at close look seams like the map of european side of Turkey of course in drawing format. Very nice music like the visual content. recommended

Am I listening to Camel? Well, there's certainly enough here to deceive you that it is. Many a reviewer point that out and I agree. On the other hand I would like to express my view that besides the Camel- infused music there's enough originality to make this album a truly exciting, beautiful, enjoyable listen, or indeed listens. Asia Minor delivers in 1981 a collection of songs by all standards dated when released. It's certainly not in the time, it's by no means neo-prog. I'd classify it as late seventies symphonic in the vein of (guess who?) Camel circa "Nude". But sometimes dated means nothing when concerning the quality. Asia Minors "Between flesh..." is a fantastic journey through beuatiful symphonic prog of the best kind. Sweeping, dreamy and full of nice changes in tempo and mood. The last song is a short but excellent, abrupt ending to this masterful release. It's true that the singer has a voice of special qualities. I can't decide what I think about it. Is he good or simply not that good? Actually, I think his voice is a part of the whole picture. Still... Anyway, it's a great album and I truly recommend it!

You have to feel for Asia minor. Active during arguably the lowest point of progressive rock's forty-five year history, this was a group who produced fine, melodic and highly-intelligent music at a time when nobody cared for such things. As a result, the history of this multi-national outfit proved to be unsurprisingly brief. Formed in Paris sometime during the late 1970s, Asia Minor featured members plucked from France, Turkey and Britain. Unable, due to their achingly unfashionable style of music, to seal any kind of record deal the four-strong group took the bold step of self-financing and self-producing both this 1979 debut release and 1981's highly-praised follow-up 'Between Flesh & Divine', a move which gave the musicians genuine artistic freedom but also fundamentally limited the record's potential commercial reach due to the lack of any kind of distribution deal. And despite the positive critical reception garnered both both albums - in particular 'Between Fleszh & Divine' - Asia Minor's career was over barely three-and-a-half years after it had begun. Obviously, one truly wonders what might have happened if the group had been around during either the genre's early peak or it's 21st century rebirth, yet thankfully they haven't been forgotten. Both albums have been reissued by the French Musea imprint, thus the group have enjoyed a well-deserved second life in the CD age. Recorded during 1979, 'Crossing The Line' is a less polished affair compared to it's well-respected follow-up, yet despite slightly muddy production values the graceful melodies still shine through. Very much a formative piece which allowed Asia Minor to hone their craft in preparation for 'Between Flesh & Divine', 'Crossing The Line' features nine carefully-composed tracks that mix a distinctly arty European sensibility with British-style symphonic flourishes, the group cleverly utilising synthesizers, acoustic-and-electric guitars and founding member Setrak Bekiral's un-flashy vocals in a crisp and clear manner that for the most deliberately eschew excessive musicianship. Highlights include opening piece 'Prelude', which opens the album on a suitably grand note, the throbbing bass thumps of the short-and-sweet 'Mystic Dance' and finally, the lushly mysterious mini- epic 'Vision'. STEFAN TURNER, STOKE NEWINGTON, 2012

Other reviewers have remarked on the sound and feel of this album being like a combination of early 70s GENESIS and CAMEL and I couldn't agree more. This is beautiful and often sophisticated music very close in feel and mastery to the models it seems to wish to emulate or perpetuate. The drumming is often worthy of superlatives while the keyboard player shows excellent instincts in playing mostly in a support role (but a very important support role, à la TONY BANKS).

"Nightwind" (8/10) opens instrumentally feeling much like an early 80s pop song (PAYOLAS "Eyes of a Stranger") before turning into a fairly sophisticated 'lost Genesis' song. Great drumming in an odd time signature with excellent support synths, moving bass, and flute lead. New section begins at 1:48--a vocal section that is quite reminiscent of 70s CAMEL. Beautiful and versatile flute playing. 5:20 Keyboard entrance end section is very reminiscent of TONY BANKS/GENESIS

"Northern Lights" (8/10). The first 2:06 are quite calm and pastoral. Then all GENESIS/CAMEL breaks loose with a very up-tempo section. At 3:45 all sound drops out to be replaced by a new section of delicate electric guitar picking and electric keyboard. At 4:38 a foreign-accented male voice enters to sing in English as the tempo picks up a bit (drums and bass join in). Fuzz guitar solo. Return of vocal. Voice is like ELOY's FRANK BORNEMANN's singing with BRYAN FERRY's phrasing--the way he down-slides the endnotes of a phrase or word.

"Boundless" (7/10) is a three-minute gentle ballad--singing from the start, ending with a drawn out, easy, repetitive electric guitar solo.

"Dedicace" (8/10) begins with the bass sound more familiar from RENAISSANCE over which a breathy flute is dancing. At 1:20 there is a very CAMEL-esque shift to a mid-tempo 'controlled jazz' section. 2:15 acoustic guitar stums beneath fuzzy electric guitar, keyboard organ while bass and drums join in at a fairly quick pace as singer comes in singing in higher register than previous songs. Very "Lady Fantasy" feeling. 3:25 totally shifts to bucolic GENESIS section. Classic GENESIS transition stuff. Return to vocal with half the freneticism of the former section (sans acoustic guitar strumming). Another repeat of the slow instrumental transition to the fast strumming acoustic guitar section with singing to sudden end.

"Lost in a Dream Yell" (9/10) begins with rain sounds, a few single random notes from treated guitar with vocal being most prominent feature--the bareness of which really makes obvious the awkward foreign accent. So ELOY! Rain and piano with electric guitar arpeggios interplay irregularly behind vocal until 2:40 when guitar arpeggios are left alone for half a minute while rain fall sounds gradually fade and synth strings and mellow flute join in. Slowly from far in the background, military drumming patterns begin to emerge and move to foreground. All the while flute continues to lead with beautiful melody. Really awesome drumming to tune into--four minutes of it! Song ends with same pattern playing out.

"Dreadful Memories" (7/10) begins with an odd, almost spy-theme music led on a DICK DALE-like bass line over which haunting synth chords are washing in and out. Song ends with a weird cut out and echoed synth fade.

A very nice listen that would definitely be an excellent addition to any prog lover's music collection. Solid four stars.

Turkish band formed in Paris around mid-70's as Asia Minor Process by three Turkish emigrants, guitarist/flutist Erik Tekeli, guitarist/singer Setrak Bakirel and drummer Can Kozlu.In 1976 Kozlu was replaced by Lionel Beltrami, the name was shortened to Asia Minor and the band started recording its first tracks, mixing Classic Prog with some Turkish ethnic sounds.In three tracks the band was helped by Grime's keyboardist Nicolas Vicente.With no particular interest in their work by labels, Asia Minor self-released their debut ''Crossing the Line'' during the spring of 1979 on their own Ware of Asia Minor.More recently the album was re-issued in CD and vinyl formats by Musea Records.

A good album indeed, ''Crossing the Line'' is often an exciting mix of melodic Progressive Rock with a CAMEL-esque edge and the darker aspects of the style, somewhat in a KING CRIMSON vein and add some deep ethnic tunes here and there.The sound is led by the guitars and flutes with long instrumental parts and professional interplays between the two instruments in a Symphonic style.The rhythm section (with Bakirel providing the bass lines) is pretty dynamic with often deep bass lines and the great drumming of Beltrami.The keyboards remain unfortunately mostly in the background, having a very thin sound.However the dominant guitar and flute parts will reward you: nice melodic hooks, folky heavy flute drives and a nice amount of breaks and battles offer series of fascinating moments.Vocals are sung in English without signs of an annoying accent but also in Turkish in a couple of tracks, the later being outstanding Progressive Rock pieces.Only a couple of flaws are detected, the one being the aforementioned thin-sounding keyboards, the other being the mediocre production overall, an evident fail regarding many prog albums around late-70's.

''Crossing the Line'' is a pretty strong release of Classic Progressive Rock by a talented band, which failed to attract around the (wrong) period of its release, but ended up to be a winner through sands of time.Strongly recommended...3.5 stars.

Showing great development over their previous album, Asia Minor's Between Flesh and Divine takes a lot of inspiration from classic Camel (from the period between Mirage and Moonmadness) and updates the sound and tightens up the song structure to deliver the prog majesty in accessible, bite-sized chunks. In other words, it's Asia Minor trying the same trick Camel did with Rain Dances of making their music more accessible - except Asia Minor accomplish the job with a great deal more panache than Camel did, retaining enough complex symphonic prog features to appeal to fans of the golden age of prog. A wonderful missing link between the symphonic bands of the golden age and the upcoming neo-prog wave.

This mildly Camel-influenced album finds Asia Minor a little short on originality, but is competently performed with reasonable (though not exceptional) production standards for a low-budget recording from the start of the 1980s. On the whole, I tend to prefer the follow-up album Between Flesh and Divine (which seems to form a conceptual sequel to this album - the two titles form a little sentence), but I suppose if you were really fond of that album and are desperate for more, this won't be too disappointing provided you don't expect a lost classic of the genre. For my part, I will stick to their superior second album.

Featuring members from Turkey, France and the UK, yet based in Paris, Asia Minor were one of those fascinating progressive rock groups who created highly-original music yet, unfortunately, existed at exactly the wrong time to make any lasting impact or commercial in- roads into the notoriously fussy 1980s music industry. The group's second full-length studio effort after 1979's interesting-yet-flawed 'Crossing The Line', 'Between Flesh And Divine' was produced and released independently, without record label support, and initially issued only in France, Italy and Belgium, with a few copies somehow finding their way to both Turkey and the USA. Of course, by the time of 'Between Flesh And Divine's 1981 release, punk-rock had been and gone, and new wave groups such as The Cure, New Order, Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran were starting to dominate both the critics favour and the lucrative charts alike, leaving little room for expansive and experimental groups such as Asia Minor, who preferred lush instrumental verve over crude trend-setting. Infuenced by, amongst others, British art-prog exponents King Crimson, symphonic high-kings Yes and many of the wonderfully-talented mid-decade Italian groups - such as PFM, Maxophone and Le Orme - Asia Minor were, sadly, very much a group borne into the wrong decade. Ten years earlier, and who knows what would have happened, as 'Between Flesh And Divine', despite it's low-budget, independent status, has, for it's type, proved both a critical success and a steady seller. Prog fans have long known about this album's intelligently-structured melodies, beautifully-wrought tracks and complex instrumentation, and tracks such as the crisply-conceived 'Nightwing', with it's deep-toned, cyclical bass-lines, stabbing keyboards and uplifting closing guitar section, and the stirring album-closer 'Lost In A Dream Yell', have since been heralded as true classics from progressive rocks wilderness years and precursors to the neo-prog boom that closely followed. The group themselves was four- strong for the recording of 'Between Flesh & Divine', featuring Setrak Bakirel(vocals, guitar), Lionel Beltrami(drums), Robert Kemplar(keyboards, bass) and Eril Tekeli(guitars, flute). All four members were highly-capable multi-instrumentalists, often doubling up on instruments to fill out the group's sound. This of course made playing live a real difficulty, and the band's independent status meant that what gigs they did play were usually sparsely-attended. However, despite the lack of interest shown in the band(who failed to get a proper record deal throughout their existence), the quality of Asia Minor's music has shone through the ages and has, thankfully, been preserved by the French label Musea, who re-released the album during the early-1990s. Since then, of course, progressive rock has seen a steady rise in popularity, and 'Between Flesh And Divine' has rightfully been re- assessed as a genuine near-masterpiece. Those who enjoy the non-English-and American side of the genre, from the great Italian groups to the likes of Bahrain's Osiris and Canada's Harmonium, should find a wonderfully-diverse album filled with expertly-woven symphonic sounds that make Asia Minor's sadly-truncated career all the more surprising. If only the group had existed ten years earlier then who knows what wonders they could, and would, have produced. 'Between Flesh And Divine' is indeed a remarkable slice of European progressive rock that should prove an excellent addition to any collection. STEFAN TURNER, LONDON, 2011