Kinetic Element working on it

Hi everybody, I know you have not seen me here in some time now, and perhaps you already know this from Facebook ... but Kinetic Element has been working on recording our second album for what is now going on two years. I am frankly embarrassed it is taking so long. But, we decided to do it ourselves because we didn't have the money to hire a studio. So Michael, our drummer, broke out his laptop and a Sonar X-1 recording program and we took the plunge starting at the end of 2012.

By mid 2013 it was becoming apparent that our side junket into playing the bars to make money was falling flat on its face. We had a nice selection of better classic rock and the radio hits of Yes, ELP, Rush, Supertramp, Chicago, Journey, etc. with our originals mixed in. Our singer, whom we took into the band after the sad realization that my vocals were not going to cut it, led us down this road. While he sounded great on our original music from Powered by Light, it was clear he was not really a prog person, and after a midsummer concert in upstate New York last year, we reluctantly fired him.

We had started recording with him, doing a song of his, and a song written by our most excellent bassist, and one co-written by our guitarist Todd and myself, and it looked like a promoter from Canada was going to put us out on the road with Mystery. But our bassist quit two weeks after we fired the singer, on the grounds that we were not good enough to play his stuff, and it turned out that the promoter was full of sh*t too, so by last August it was just me, Michael and Todd. We lost all the time it took to record Len's piece and George's song since we would now not be including them on the record.

But, with those two gone, all of a sudden a gush of new music came out of me and Todd. We threw ourselves into recording and abandoned playing out till we should have a product to support. We are now eleven months into this project, to be titled Travelog: Quest for Liberty. It will be five pieces, three by me, two by Todd, arranged by the band, and lyrically themed around the need to assert human freedom in a world headed in the opposite direction.

Around March we were very blessed to discover a most excellent bassist here in Richmond named Mark Tupko. He is currently performing with classic rockers Crush, but he had been following us for a couple of years, and when we lost Len, he decided to try his hand at it. We were going to outsource the bass to a great Rick player in Nashville named Jaymi Millard, but we really wanted somebody local to us. Jaymi was very gracious, and gave his blessing to our going with Mark. And Mark has been simply awesome fitting his bass in with the tracks we had already recorded when we found him.

We are talking with a terrific singer from the Baltimore area named Dimetrius LaFlavors who sings with prog metallugists Odin's Court, and we hope this will work out for both bands. His range is just stupendous and he loves both prog metal AND symphonic prog.

Here is a link to a 5-minute demo of the opening section of one of the pieces from Travelog. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5ZhWCPooBA

We are about halfway through this recording. We are hoping to engage Brett Kull of Echolyn to mix this but we are going to have to raise some money to do that, so we'll be getting a crowd funder going soon. If you want to get on board let us know! Message me on Facebook.

Thanks for staying with us ... give us a listen once in a while. We still have Powered by Light uploaded to the station.

PROG LIVES. It keeps us young. A spirit with a vision is a dream with a mission.

Edited by miketheorganist - August 16 2014 at 15:57