VOYAGER

The second album by the Finnish instrumentally oriented trio KATAYA (featuring Matti Kervinen on keyboards plus some vocals and multi-instrumentalists Sami Sarhamaa and Teijo Tikkanen) offers a dreamy voyage full of Floydian spaceyness and beauty. It can be said right away that those prog listeners who want complex structures, challenging musical ideas, unpredictability and virtuotic fast playing would be either deadly bored or deeply frustrated as they would wait something edgier to finally happen. But those who enjoy floating comfortably in harmonic atmospheres - like one floats in a foam bath - will most likely find a lot of pleasure from this album.

This is pure horizon painting with no intentions to convince anyone with technical competence. Guitars and keyboards - I believe it to be analog equipment such as Moog - work side by side to build ear-pleasing sound layers where it becomes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. I deliberately sound like speaking of gentle intercourse. This music is smooth and emotional, and the album proceeds in such a delicate manner that one hardly notices any seams between the tracks. Even the mood never goes very far from New Age -reminding universal harmony, it just gets slightly more melancholic or shadowy or brighter or adventurous along the way.

If Canto Obscura (2008) provoked forest-smelling images of nature, Voyager has taken off the ground and travels across the starry night sky. Some prog purists may look down their noses at this album, as its serenity and softness is in many ways an antithesis to modern prog, but I'm deeply pleased that there are musicians reminding us that progressive rock has every right to be harmonically beautiful and perhaps undemanding too.