New prog supergroup "Amaran's Plight"

DC Cooper (Ex-Royal Hunt, Silent Force)
Gary Wehrkamp (Shadow Gallery)
Nick D'Virgilio (Spock's Beard, Kevin Gilbert, Tears for Fears, Genesis)
Kurt Barabas (Under the Sun)

The band's debut album, “Voice in the Light” will be released worldwide this spring by Progrock Records and its label partners. Voice in the Light was recorded in 2006 at Gary Wehrkamp's New Horizon Studio's and described as textbook Symphonic Progressive Metal. It combines the soaring vocals of DC Cooper with the master riffs and melodies of Gary Wehrkamp, backed by the sonic, dynamic and explosive rhythm section of D'Virgilio and Barabas.

Gary Wehrkamp and DC Cooper are no strangers to working together. Gary is the keyboardist, guitarist and Producer of veteran Proggers, Shadow Gallery. DC Cooper appeared on their 1999 conceptual piece, Tyranny as a guest vocalist on the epic track, New World Order. Fans of Shadow Gallery have longed for a Wehrkamp/Cooper collaboration ever since. DC Cooper is the voice behind the Power Prog-metal band, Silent Force. Before joining forces with guitarist Alex Boyrodt to form Silent Force, he was vocalist for veteran Proggers, Royal Hunt. DC will also be a special guest at the upcoming Bay Area Rock Fest in early May (www.bayarearockfest.com).

Nick D’Virgilio is one of the highest rated drummers in Prog today. Besides being the driving force behind Spock’s Beard, he has also played with Mike Kennealy, Kevin Gilbert, Tears for fears and Genesis. Nick takes drumming to the next level on Voice in the Light with an over the top performance that adds emotion, heart and a sonic punch that makes the bands debut album a must hear.

Kurt Barbaras is one of the founding members of Los Angeles based Under The Sun and along with Shadow Gallery was part of the prog revival spearheaded by Magna Carta records in the early 90's. Kurt's bass playing is often singled out as the driving force of Under The Sun.

Amazing conceptual album in the vein of Shadow Gallery and Images & Words era Dream Theater. Highly recommended! One of the albums of the year!



Edited by Rocket_Bob - June 10 2007 at 12:10

Will it be released on download platforms like Napster or eMusic? I hope so ... 

Very interested in this project. The ingredients are all there for something very special.

^ ok ... mindawn.com is nice, I downloaded an album there ... but it's almost twice as expensive as emusic.com, and the OGG format won't work on my portable player, so I would have to buy the expensive FLAG version, burn it to a CD and rip it again ....

So since I only have limited funds to buy new albums, I guess this one will have to wait until I can get it cheap on ebay.

Edited by MikeEnRegalia - June 11 2007 at 02:48

BigBoss wrote: The CD started shipping last week. It will be available on the standard download systems in addition to Mindawn, but that will probably take a month. It will be in stores at the end of June. As to Mindawn and the FLAC file format, you're talking $8.99 for a digital download that is in fact CD quality, you can decompress the FLAC to WAV or AIFF and either burn it to a CD or encode it to some other format like MP3 if you want, a tool like dbPowerAmp is pretty versatile in that regard. We appreciate the kind words thus far, this album was a long time coming, but we're really pleased with the final results.

I didn't mean to bash the concept of offering lossless formats for download ... I love the idea, and I think that the price is quite reasonable. It's the OGG files - they are much more expensive than the high quality files which emusic.com offfers. I also know that I could download the ogg files and listen to them for free in the mindawn client software ... that's also a great feature. Still, the Napster flatrate allows me to listen to the album on my portable player as often as I like without having to purchase it in full, and that's why I made the post ... anyway, the more services the album is available through, the more (legal) listeners it will attract!


Edited by MikeEnRegalia - June 12 2007 at 13:31

the problem with the Napster model is that the musician doesn't make crap. We literally get about 2 cents for one of those sales, so it doesn't do the artist any good.

our reporting doesn't really identify the model, but pretty much everything that comes in from Napster is in the 1 to 3 cent range per song.

One more album to look forward to...

Thanks for letting me know about the broken link, but where are you seeing it? I don't have a link to it from progrockrecords.com that I know of. Our audio samples are all on the progrockrecords page, so you do have audio samples. I haven't put anything on MySpace yet because, to be honest, I haven't figured out how to do it yet :)

Edited by BigBoss - June 13 2007 at 14:19

I TALKED ABOUT THE BAND IN THE "Suggest Bands" thread and nobody answer... not ONE answer....