Cargo 2009

This unit started out as September and recorded a few singles that hold no interest to progheads. They then changed their name to Cargo and recorded their sole album. Cargo consist of brothers Ad and Jan De Hont both on guitars, Willem DeVries on bass and vocals and English drummer Denis Whitbread. The music developed here is a seducing hard rock with a killer twin-guitar attack much in the line of Wishbone Ash around their "Argus" album. The two brothers play delightfully long and cooperative guitar lines that intertwine beautifully (what a pleasure it is to follow in stereo their progress) proof of their long-standing mutual trust and camaraderie.

Strange Cargo III is the fourth album by electronic instrumentalist William Orbit. The album matches elegant sequencer trance and understated organic instruments (piano, guitar) with ethnic-fusion and soft house rhythms. It's the only Strange Cargo record featuring vocals, with Beth Orton making an early appearance (more earth mother than neo-folky) on the beautiful ambient-trance single "Water From a Vine Leaf." "Into the Paradise" and "The Story of Light" are variations on the same form, while Orbit borrows from hip-hop and dub for "Time to Get Wize," with the toasting of Divine Bashim. While still tied to the '80s Fourth World aesthetic of its predecessors, on Strange Cargo III Orbit begins moving toward a more completely electronic form of music in keeping with the productions of his Guerilla label.

High Tide was a highly underrated British band that played psychedelic progressive rock when the genre was in its infancy. "Precious Cargo" is seven tracks of live in the studio slices of hauntingly beautiful yet terrifying soundscapes. Their sound is one that should have been playing in the background of an Alfred Hitchcock film or more recently, a Wes Craven production comes to mind. What made their sound so eerie was the violin of Simon House. Much in the same way Jean Luc Ponty used his instrument, House used his violin as more of a lead instrument and the rest of the band fell in line to fill in the layers to make one impressive wall of sound that would wake up the spirit and startle the thought process; their music was very potent.

Originally intended as a side-project, Subsignal were founded back in 2007 by former Sieges Even members Arno Menses (Vocals) and Markus Steffen (Guitars). The first result of this collaboration was a song called ‘A Wallflower On The Day Of Saint Juliana’ which eventually appeared under the title ‘Eyes Wide Open’ on the 2007-Sieges Even-output ‘Paramount’. After Arno and Markus had left the band in the summer of 2008, they immediately started to look for adequate musicians to turn the project into a functional ‘real’ band. The first to join was Ralf Schwager (Bass), who was known for his work with German progmetal outfit Dreamscape. The line-up was completed by the Dutch drummer Roel van Helden (Sun Caged) and keyboarder David Bertok (also Dreamscape).