ASTROCAST34: Big Voyage's Prog Odyssey by Astro Nautico on Mixcloud
Big Voyage might be a new name to many of you - hell, we just discovered him no more than a few months ago. But it was one of those moments like - WHO THIS KID, WHY HAVE I NOT HEARD OF HIM BEFORE? He is based out of Brooklyn after all.
Anyway, we asked him to contribute a track for our latest compilation, Atlantics Vol. 3 and he gave us “Cora Pearl” which is slowly become a YouTube hit. You may very well see more collaborations from him + us in the near future.
And then there’s this mix - an hour of nothing but prog - and a lot of rare stuff too…he went deep. He even has a couple custom edits of tunes in there - more or less spelling out the connections that his music and this wildly progressive music share.
Get ready for a Big Voyage.
Interview
1. So, first of all, where’d you develop this deep love and appreciation of prog music? It has to be one of the most hated on genres in all of music.
I only got into prog maybe when I started buying a lot of dollar bin vinyl. If you put a winged-elephant fighting a giant Komodo dragon on your cover I will always pay two bucks to find out what that shit sounds like. Roger Dean is that dude for me, Mati Klarwein too. The better prog records put you right in there, astral traveling with the space jelly-fish and shit.
I don’t actually disagree with the general consensus that prog is mostly pretty awful… a lot of the two minute chunks in the mix come from 18 minute song-suites with Aaron Copeland Tribute Jams and “interludes” and whatever… but just when you’re about to give up on it the harpsichord solo segues into something just insanely dope and you have to go buy another six King Crimson albums. These dudes were basically the sickest musicians ever (a bunch went onto have big pop hits… Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel…), but this is them doing whatever they felt like, with no filter at all, and a lot of the time it sucked, but when it didn’t it was awesome in totally novel ways. The 4th song on the mix is in 10/4 time, but it’s super fucking hard and funky as shit. Yes has a song “We Have Heaven” that sounds just like Animal Collective, except it came first and by 30 years. I’m not mad at anyone who doesn’t feel it, but for me it’s worth it, slogging through the sucky stuff.
2. Your own productions definitely borrow from prog in a sense, with regards to arrangement and musicality. We also hear a lot of jazz in there. What’s your musical background?
I started playing saxophone in third grade and got into jazz pretty heavily. I liked that getting really good at an instrument is basically a nerd pursuit, but a lot of famous dudes who were practicing 14 hours a day were also totally badasses and reprobates… pimps and drug addicts and stuff. It was sort of important to me at the time that it was possible to be nerd and something else at the same time, cause I was definitely a nerd. I started playing guitar in high-school to write songs for my ska band Money$hot (…. yeah). Started learning piano around then too. Went to NYU, studied jazz and writing. For a while I wanted to be a music critic, even interned at Rolling Stone for a few months, but I wasn’t that good and there are something like 5 professional music critics in the whole world anyhow. My last big music project before starting Big Voyage up was this jazz/ metal fusion thing… I gave up on it after spending six months on this one song that nobody liked (it was a bad song). I actually pay my rent these days teaching piano, mostly to kids but a few adults as well. I still take piano lessons too (shout to Dave Frank!), and that stuff makes into my tracks all the time, especially all the harmony stuff.
3. A lot of prog music is heavily influenced by fiction writing - fantasy, science-fiction etc. Do you find any such similar influences from literature?
Nah, not on purpose at least, but who knows what’s seeping in. I’ll say this though: when I first started playing sax I was hugely into the “Spellsinger” books by Alan Dean Foster, which was basically this guy singing pop songs at trolls, who would then be dispersed by scary “Purple Hazes” or “Little Red Corvettes” tear-assing around (he had a magic guitar, it’d conjure stuff). When I’m really hurting for inspiration my go-to thing is nature docs. “Life in the Undergrowth” will fuck up your whole worldview. If you don’t get something out of leopard-slugs mating you shouldn’t be doing music, that shit is inspiring on several levels. Going for a walk is good stuff too.
4. Your song “Cora Pearl” from Atlantics was recently uploaded to a popular YouTube channel and is currently over 75k views and growing - have you read any of the comments? Any in particular that resonate with you?
Yo, I’m too scared to read the comments. I’m scared it’s gonna be like “this sucks” 80,000 times. I have been keeping an eye on that number though. If it hits 100,000 (it did) I’m finally gonna tell mom I’m not going to law school.
5. Finally, we must ask - What is the biggest voyage you’ve ever taken? And do you have a dream voyage you have yet to embark on?
I went to Thailand! It was nuts. Went to this elephant refuge where you don’t get to ride them but you can take them to the river and rub them down with sponges. Apparently you have to really brutalize them to train them into taking riders, so only go to the one where you can’t ride them. They eat right over there too. The best, cheapest food. I want to see Africa so fucking bad man. Super bad. I can’t even get into it, these are long-ass answers as-is. I want to see the Mariana Trench too, but there’s apparently only one or two subs that can get down there, and they don’t really let you go just for asking. Space is cool but all the best shit is too far away. Once they have that FTL drive going though, I’m all about it.
*BONUS*
You didn’t ask, but here are some prog albums that are dope from start to finish (mostly): Fragile and “Close to the Edge by Yes, In The Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson, Gentle Giant by Gentle Giant, U.K. by U.K., Aqua Lung by Jethro Tull. Kevin Ayers just died, so go get the first three Soft Machine records too.
