The interconnected modern prog scene?

I've never really listened to The Tangent, but for some reason today I was reading about their upcoming album (Le Sacre du Travail) on these forums, and noticed that Rikard Sjoblom of Beardfish is contributing spoken voice- a cute little response to Alex Tillison providing a spoken intro to Beardfish's The Void last year, one would assume.

It got me thinking about the apparent interconnectedness of the core of the modern prog scene, where a great many musicians seem to have a large number of collaborative links and projects with members of other bands, ultimately exemplified by such 'supergroups' as The Tangent, and perhaps more so than in other genres. Even more particularly, this includes, or even features, members of the classic bands and all their projects becoming involved with the projects of the modern prog scene (ie, David Jackson in The Tangent; the various forms of Fripp/Wilson collaboration) or vice versa (Jon Davison of Glass Hammer joining Yes), bringing together musicians of different eras in this kind of creative coalescence.

This largely applies only to the symphonic/eclectic core of the scene (as opposed to RIO/metal/post rock, etc subgenres, and regardless progressive music as we broadly define it doesn't have a delineated scene per se), but it's an interesting phenomenon, and I think an makes an interesting topic for general discussion. So, thoughts?

I don't know why you discount the RIO scene with many bands having relationships with each other, there's the recent Aranis-Present-Univers Zero, One Upon A Time In Belgium collaboration. Yugen's last studio album had a bunch of Thinking Plague guests. Dave Kerman & Pierre Chevalier (Present) appeared on the 2010 Aranis album. Henry Cow & Slapp Happy famously collaborated.

Additionally, I think it's a good point to remember that, in smaller creative communities, artists may find strength in numbers, frequently networking for moral support, creative inspiration, or possibly somebody to collaborate with.

Nogbad_The_Bad wrote: I don't know why you discount the RIO scene with many bands having relationships with each other, there's the recent Aranis-Present-Univers Zero, One Upon A Time In Belgium collaboration. Yugen's last studio album had a bunch of Thinking Plague guests. Dave Kerman & Pierre Chevalier (Present) appeared on the 2010 Aranis album. Henry Cow & Slapp Happy famously collaborated.

Also, for many fans, having guest musicians featuring in an album makes it more attractive, it creates some extra curiosity as for how will the collaboration sound like, and it probably will expand the potential buyers of the album to the fans of the guests musicians bands as well, increasing the sales potential.

Hi,

Earendil wrote: Anyway, I think most of the comments here are spot on.   Another aspect that hasn't been discussed yet is how these collaborations can literally introduce a listener to a new genre.  For example, after hearing Ayreon's The Human Equation (symphonic rock) and being impressed by Eric Clayton's vocals, I immediately looked up the band that he was in.  And thus I discovered Saviour Machine and symphonic gothic metal, a genre which I had had no contact with before.  And this led me to check out other gothic metal artists like Tiamat and ...Into the Woods.  Another example is Jon Anderson appearing on Kitaro's album Dream.  This was my first real encounter with new age music, and it prompted me to check out other artists like Enya and Gandalf. The possibilities seem endless...

How nice that AYREON's HUMAN EQUATION Lead you to the wonderful ERIC CLAYTON. This makes me happy to hear.
So how do you like SAVIOUR MACHINE ?

prog4evr wrote: In some cases, it is to build a CV

Fist I thought you meant 'creative venue' until I realized it was 'curriculum vitae' .    Frankly it should be to build a creative venue  .

It's also fairly neat to find out members of more recent groups perform throughout older groups, like Mikael Akerfeldt doing words on Dorrie Hackett's revisited sort of Supper's All set. Or older prog musicians actively playing throughout more recent rings, similar to any time Fripp toured using Instrument.

Hi,