NOSTRADAMUS BOOK OF PROPHECIES

On this concept album about the titular soothsayer and his enigmatic prophecies, Solaris mash up symphonic prog with touches of world music, opera, Gregorian chant, and resolutely modern instrumentation and production techniques to produce something rather extraordinary.

Although their debut album came out in a period when prog was an ugly word, by the time 1999 rolled around a revival was well underway, and it would have been all too easy for Solaris to take a more retro-prog route, with lots of analogue synths to really drive home the nostalgia factor. However, they don't take that route: instead they produce an album replete with a mixture of very ancient sounds (the aforementioned chants) and extremely modern ones, with synth-wrangler Róbert Erdész using a slate of digital equipment to add a futuristic sheen to things.

This, of course, is all very apt to the concept - the album itself sounds like it is unstuck in time, drawing heavily on the long-ago past and the imagined future but with a gap where the "present" sits, with the end result being simultaneously truly inventive but still close enough to symphonic prog in ethos that prog fans will find it an enjoyable prospect.