Progressive Rock
Hacktrax (self-released) · 23 October 2026
John Hackett’s great-uncle Jack was at one point the oldest living British veteran of the First World War, and Hackett says the period has always resonated with him. That war is the subject of the first of the two seven-part suites on “Of Mountains And Fields”, which he released on 23 October: “The War Suite” follows a young soldier, “another face in the crowd”, from “Country Dance” to “To Have And To Hold”, by way of “Enlistment”, “Estaminet”, “Despair”, “Where Poppies Grow” and “Demobbed”.
The second, “The Cerqueto Suite”, is a thank-you to the people of Cerqueto, a mountain village in Abruzzo that he first visited in 2018 with Marco Lo Muscio to play at the start of the village’s living nativity. Each piece is a corner of the village: the Gran Sasso at dawn and at dusk, the museum, the hut, the bar, the sheep fountain and the Church of Saint Reparata. In all, that’s fourteen tracks and around forty-six minutes.
Hackett, the brother of guitarist Steve Hackett, handles everything – composition, arrangements and production – and plays flute and keyboards and does the programming, with the orchestra built from Spitfire Audio’s “BBC Symphony Orchestra” samples. “It was recorded using orchestral samples combined with my solo flute, no AI in sight,” he writes in the notes for the CD, which he sells through his own site, Hacktrax. His previous release was “Red Institution”, credited to the John Hackett Band and out on 11 April 2025.
Text by Guillem Cardós