Art Music

Robert Reed and Steve Balsamo's progressive electronic duo Chimpan A are back with their long-awaited third album, the teasingly-titled Music Is Art - Vol. 1. Comprising original material and some surprising cover versions, the doublelength record also includes a host of impressive musical guests. The pair discuss making big-sounding songs, fanboy moments in the studio and their plans to cast us all under the Chimp spell!

- Words: Johnny Sharp

If it feels like 15 minutes, then you've failed; if it flies, you've succeeded." That's Robert Reed's response when explaining the way he and Steve Balsamo have made what initially resemble three to four-minute pop songs into more expansive pieces as Chimpan A. It certainly seems that way to Prog's ears on hearing Music Is Art Vol 1, the long-fermenting fruit of the project that the pair have been maintaining on and off since the early 2000s. Following up 2020's The Empathy Machine, Reed (best known elsewhere for his longtime stewardship of Magenta) and Balsamo (who previously worked with Deep Purple's Jon Lord and Alan Parsons Project co-writer Eric Woolfson) have created an album's worth of original material and then backed it with another set of inventively tackled cover versions that bring a similar level of creativity and intrigue to bear on well-established and well-loved material from the popular songbook.

The sound can best be described - very loosely as progressive pop, weaving in styles that may err audibly on the side of soul and trip-hop compared to the folkier and more rock-influenced work of Magenta, or more grandiose projects such as Poe, or Jesus Christ Superstar in the West End, which Balsamo starred in back in the mid-90s. But for Reed, the lack of generic rules in play is exactly what makes it progressive.

"I might be opening up a massive can of worms here, but what is prog rock? It's meant to be progressive, and making it sound like Genesis... that's surely going backwards.