Hi from Beijing!

I'm Ben, actually from Stockport (don't go there! No really, don't...) near Manchester, UK but I've been living in China for the past few years, getting by and improving my Chinese so I could study here, which hopefully I'll be starting doing from next month  I also play in a band here, but our singer is an aging punk who still holds a prejudice against prog!

I've been reading/using this site for a couple of years I guess, getting some great music recommendations from all the excellent reviews you guys have posted! For some reason I never bothered registering until now, prompted by a certain Neu! album I thought had been unfairly dismissed (Neu! 2, if you must know!). I love pretty much all kinds of music (except commercial pop/RnB/indie), but I suppose that's a bit of a cop-out for a self-introduction!

So anyway, in terms of prog I guess krautrock (especially Can, Amon Duul II, Faust and Ash Ra Tempel) and the Canterbury scene (especially Caravan, Soft Machine, Gong and Kevin Ayers - I was born there, actually!) are my favourite genres, though I'm also a big prog metal fan, especially Opeth, Death, Enslaved, Meshuggah, Shining, Ihsahn, Agalloch, Moonsorrow, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Fantomas, and love a lot of other prog like Van der Graaf, The Mars Volta, King Crimson, Genesis, Gentle Giant and Henry Cow, and some prog-ish folk like Jethro Tull, Steeleye Span, Comus, Incredible String Band and Roy Harper (legend!). A lot of this stuff I got into via this site, so thanks and any more recommendations would be welcome!

Recently I've also been listening to more jazz, I've loved Miles, Coltrane, Monk, Mingus, etc for a while, but lately I've got hold of some more free/experimental jazz like Eric Dolphy, Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and McCoy Tyner, as well as some older/classic stuff like Art Tatum, Lennie Tristano and Bill Evans and recent groups like EST. I like a bit of folk too, especially Dylan, John Martyn, Townes van Zandt, Tim Buckley and John Fahey, as well as a lot of older pre-war blues and folk (just got hold of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, amazing!). Finally I also love classical music, especially Beethoven and Messiaen (definitely my two favourite composers), as well as Shostakovich, Sibelius, Mahler, Bach and Bartok.