The Copenhagen quartet VOLA offer 1970s prog rock [ a la Pink Floyd ]combined with modern day electronica, industrial & metal varnishes, then polished off with vividly resplendent vocal lines. This new approach to prog is offered on their debut album Inmazes, which is out on Mascot Records September 16.
VOLA – What we’ve always liked from artists like Steven Wilson and Devin Townsend is that the music can change the physical state you’re in…
Singer Asger Mygind explained the development of the VOLA sound, “We started experimenting with 7-string guitars and a lot of polymetrics — odd-time signatures over a straight 4/4 beat in our case. And it worked so well on the [On Monsters ] EP that we wanted to elaborate on this for a full album.”
When Mygind was in high school he started writing songs and jamming with his friends in a rehearsal room in the basement of his parents’ house in Copenhagen. “The collaboration grew out of a common interest in melodic rock and weird time signatures. We’d listen to stuff like Dream Theater, Freak Kitchen, Opeth and Porcupine Tree and tried to play their songs in order to explore what kind of sound we could create as a unit…”
“What we’ve always liked from artists like Steven Wilson and Devin Townsend is that the music can change the physical state you’re in. It’s not just sound reaching your ears. It’s a force of a larger scale.”
VOLA is completed with keyboard player Martin Werner, bassist Nicolai Mogensen and drummer Felix Ewert.
To prepare us, we listened to “Starburn” taken from the forthcoming Inmazes album —
This begins with some blustering axis-symmetric chaff countermeasures of delicate foil and leaf.
Then the chaff is blown away by an iron mandrel of heavier & woozier sounds. This is when the low, guttural vocalizations begin, echoing a similarly drawn bass-guitar motif.
Starburn is a creatively spun and brilliantly drawn reception piece of high altitude richness and redoubtable tensile strength …
Words: @neilmach 2016 ©
Link: https://www.facebook.com/volaband/
