Gentō is a new album by Bioscope, a collaborative project from Marillion’s Steve Rothery and Tangerine Dream’s Thorsten Quaeschning. The pair first met aboard ship during 2014’s Cruise To The Edge, which saw a variety of prog bands perform on the high seas in front of a hoard of like-minded music fans.
Later on it was mooted that a possible musical alliance might be forthcoming and now the project has come to fruition, with a little help from Elbow’s Alex Reeves on drums. The album is an immersive experience with broad cinematic soundscapes conjured from Thorsten’s bank of analogue synths and Steve’s ever melodic guitar. But let’s start at the beginning…
We both did this progressive rock festival at sea that sailed from Miami around the Caribbean for about five days in 2014. So I saw Tangerine Dream perform then. I mean, I listened to Tangerine Dream when I was 15 or 16 – Ricochet and Stratosfear.
In March 2020 he was over for a solo show in London, and he came up to the Racket Club – the Marillion studio – with all this gear. We had several hours of experimenting, and it was pretty obvious that there was a good chemistry there. It was a bit ‘when two worlds collide’, but it worked really well.
So you were a Tangerine Dream fan from way back?
The option of Rothery and Quaeschning sounded like a firm of accountants! So I was researching the early cinema and I came across ‘bioscope’
Yeah. I wasn’t a huge fan, but I really liked what they did. You know, that whole genre of music I loved; Vangelis, especially his soundtrack for Blade Runner. We struck up a really good creative relationship, really. It’s no egos, just a love of music and creating. It’s been about six years for the album to come together, but if you add up the amount of time we’ve been in the same room it’s probably only five weeks.
Where did the name of the band come from?
As we were listening to the music, when it was progressing, it was all very cinematic. One of the times I was in Berlin I did some research about what to name it because the option of Rothery and Quaeschning sounded like a firm of accountants! So I was researching the early cinema and I came across ‘bioscope’, which was one of the early film projection systems developed in Berlin in the 1800s – I thought that could be a really cool name for the band.
Did the music emerge from jamming together in the studio?
Everything we’ve written has come out of improvisation. We only did one session at the Racket Club and every other session has been at Thorsten’s studio in Berlin. But it was just very easy, you know?
He’s a master of the analogue world: lots of analogue synthesizers, modular systems, analogue sequencers. He would set something going with some interesting chords and I would come up with melodies and arpeggios and textures over that. It was like a musical conversation, really.
Did you overdub your guitar parts or was it all spontaneous collaboration?
No, it was all born in the moment from the very first note we played together. He’d set something going and I’d play something on the top of it, and he’d change it and I’d follow. Some of the tracks, like Kaleidoscope, we decided we were going to try to write something a bit more uptempo to a loop, and I came up with the guitar riffs. And eventually the track developed from what it was.
How did the sessions contrast with the way you work in Marillion?
Oh, very different. The way that Marillion have written, really, for the last 20 years of our 45-year career, is that we tend to write by jamming, and the producer will sift through the ideas and upload the best moments to a SoundCloud link, and we all listen and make judgments on those and put the best moments together eventually. But it’s quite a long, slow process. Whereas with the Bioscope project, it was a lot quicker to develop. There were no committees involved.
What gear did you use for the album?
For the session at the Racket Club, I used my backline. So it’s a whole range of stuff: Blade S-types, there’s this Ibanez Artist that I used on that session. I used a Telecaster [style model]… all sorts of things, but mainly three different Blade S-types, one with EMG SA pickups.
At the Marillion studio, my backline is all sorts of things. A couple of [GigRig] G2s controlling racks of gear from a Groove Tubes Trio preamp, a Hughes & Kettner Rotosphere, which is a favourite of mine. Lots of tremolo pedals, different modulation effects, a Pitcher amp, which is a bit like a Dumble – a great clean sound. Various Free The Tone delays, some special reverbs… all manner of things.
The Meris Enzo is on there, and one of the ones I used quite a lot on the record is the Eventide H90 pedal. As things developed, I used it as an excuse to buy more and more pedals. So I’ve probably spent all my royalties on the endless pedals that arrive at the door to my wife’s displeasure.
I’ve probably spent all my royalties on the endless pedals that arrive at the door to my wife’s displeasure
At what stage did you get Elbow’s Alex Reeves involved?
The last session we did last December in Berlin, we kind of took stock of our situation and thought, ‘Well, we’re pretty close to having an album here, we should really try to finish it.’ We thought it’d be great to have some live drums on this and we spent several hours trawling through YouTube for different drummers we’d consider working with.
A friend of mine, Matt Prior, who plays guitar with Bonnie Tyler, had worked with Alex on some sessions and really recommended him. So I emailed Alex and I sent him some of the ideas, and he got straight back to me and said he loved it and would love to be involved with the record.
Thorsten flew over in March of this year and we both went to Alex’s studio in North London. He recorded all the drums on the album in two days, which was quite a remarkable achievement. He just doesn’t seem to make a mistake, you know? In fact, he’s playing with us live when we go out in December for some European shows.
How are you going to rework the material for live performance?
Well, my good friend Dave Foster, who plays in my solo band, is going to be playing second guitar. I’ve played live with Tangerine Dream several times, so I understand the kind of system that Thorsten uses in that live environment. It’s going to be very exciting having Alex with us.
I think it’s going to add a really interesting dimension. We’ve got a great light show with amazing videos for all the tracks. We have a huge video wall behind and this great live sound engineer, Ian Bond, who normally does Porcupine Tree and Steven Wilson, so it should look and sound fantastic.
Are there any plans to perform in the UK?
Yes. These shows we’re doing, which are two in the Netherlands, two in Germany and one in Warsaw, the only reason I could do those is because Marillion stops for Christmas, basically. So as soon as Marillion stops, I put these shows in. I’d like to think we can do some more shows next April, and I’m planning at least two, hopefully three, UK shows then.
- Gentō is out now via earMUSIC.
- This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save.
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