Progressive Rock
Kavus Torabi released “October by Name” on 2 October through Believers Roast and Bad Omen Records. It runs to six songs and thirty-three minutes and forty-seven seconds: “Signals Shine” (5:16), “In Her Radiance” (6:33), “Water Into Wine” (4:11), “From The Storm” (6:11), “My Shameful Namesake” (4:02) and “Ancestor’s Song” (7:31).
He played and recorded all of it himself, using only the instruments he had to hand, and it is the third part of a trilogy that began with “Hip To The Jag” (2020) and “The Banishing” (2022). The title came from a dream.
The one thing he does explain is the order he records in: “My favourite part of recording a song is doing the bass line,” he says. “Once all the vocals are down, all the harmonies, all the changes, I put the bass on last.”
Torabi played in Cardiacs with Tim Smith, who died in 2020, and has been in Gong since 2014, when Daevid Allen brought him in as second guitarist, and has fronted the band since 2015, the year Allen died. The album is out on vinyl, CD and digitally.
Text by Guillem Cardós