So what is progressive rock today, in 2025? Is it just a relic of a more naïve era of music that occurred fifty years ago, or is it more than that?

I think there's a dimension to it that is.. that, what you said. I mean, an undiscovered country can only stay undiscovered until it's discovered, right?

There's a certain Spinal Tap logic to that.

I guess. But it did start fifty years ago, or sixty, even: The Beatles in 1965 had Rubber Soul, and The Beach Boys had Pet Sounds at more or less the same time, maybe 1966. I don't think I'm alone regarding those two albums as a kind of ur-prog: progressive at least in terms of orchestration and the idea of what instruments could be used on a pop single and how the songs took shape. Although the songs themselves hewed very closely to a harmonic lexicon that wouldn't have been considered daring in Beethoven's time.

When The Moody Blues did Days Of Future Passed, it was of a piece with what The Beatles had done on, say, She's Leaving Home from Sgt Peppers. In the beginning there was a bit of overlap between the progressive aspect and what came to be called symphonic rock, I mean, it was new, a juxtaposition that hadn't been heard before in rock music to any great extent. But symphonic rock turned into a formula pretty quickly, one the Moodies exploited for the rest of their career. How much wiggle room is there in a formula for further experimentation?

Robert Fripp said something back in the late 70s or early 80s that sticks with me: he pushed back on the idea that progressive was a style of music, so much as a quality that either is or isn't present in some aspect of the music, and I find that helpful in terms of starting to piece together an answer to your question. I mean, we use the term progressive as shorthand for certain tropes about music: music meant to be taken seriously as art, and listened to passively rather than danced to actively; a certain wistful nod to symphonic music, or jazz music, or both, by rock musicians playing rock instruments, leveraging technology to produce distinct and often new sounds; ponderous and sometimes silly philosophical or faux-philosophical lyrics; flashy musicianship and plenty of opportunity to flaunt it; songs that don't necessarily stay in common time and can seem to last for days in the hands of some bands and epics that can seem to last for a few minutes in the hands of a few wizards.

And to some degree all those tropes taken together have calcified into a formula — do this, this, this, and this, presto, you're making prog rock. But what I think sets prog apart is the actual sense that someone is trying to push a boundary somewhere, even if it's a personal boundary. Dylan's music isn't all that progressive as we tend to use the term these days, but if you were a fan in 1965 when he picked up that Strat in Newport? You saw that he was leaving something behind and setting foot in unfamiliar terrain.

These days, I'd say we label a piece of music as progressive only by comparison to more doctrinaire music, like what gets played on the radio most prominently, or the makeup of your typical music consumer's playlist. It's still up to the composer to resolve the internal tension that all composers working in this space come to terms with sooner or later: to look backward nostalgically at the music that first inspired them, and/or to look forward and step out of the comfort zone a bit into parts unknown. And I'm doing both, I think.

You mentioned Genesis was the first show you attended, in 1981. Did other tours leave an impression on you over the last forty-odd years?

For sheer stagecraft, Peter Gabriel touring So in 1986, caught them at the old New Haven Coliseum. Using the stagehands as a kind of western kabuki theatre, handling the lights. I caught Bowie's Glass Spider tour the next year, I'd heard it was going to be a theatrical extravaganza to surpass the Let's Dance tour, which I'd seen on HBO, but in the event I was so far back at Giants Stadium that a lot of the finer points were lost on me. Like Steve Martin performing the disappearing penny magic trick specifically for the people in the cheap seats way in the back of the arena. Peter Frampton played lead guitar for him on that tour, he was amazing. Squeeze opened the show, and I was glad to have seen them for the first but definitely not the last time.

Pat Metheny Group at the old Norwalk High School, Offramp tour, I guess 1982... The first song was Phase Dance — by the time it came to that final climactic section, I was in tears. That music shook me down to my shoes. Leaving aside lyrical craft, it was everything I wanted for my own music, the highs, the lows, the compositions, the drama, the triumph, the improvisations. I stayed up all night at the piano, practicing, after I saw Lyle Mays.. rest his soul. He still inspires me; much of what I bring into an improvised section of a song comes from his influence — not to imply I'm anywhere near his technical prowess. The understated beginning and exploration, the purposeful building to a climax as he went along, the feeling that it can’t possibly get any more tense, so that when the release finally does come it’s literally a catharsis.

Catharsis is one of the songwriter’s most potent stocks in trade, as it applies to longer-form music, not to mention spontaneous auto-composition (which is what jazz soloing is, at the end of the day). It's not so much of an issue in classic rock. Your basic rock song might have three or four chords in it, contrast in the bridge section, instrumental commentary usually from the guitarist. Right? Get your A section, repeat it, swerve into a mildly contrasting B section, repeat A again. There’s the template for more than half the Great American Song Book right there. Twelve-bar blues makes up another huge chunk outside of that. And that’s cool, you know, that’s why rock was a juggernaut all through the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up. Get in, get out, no messing about. The chords came from Delta blues, electric Chicago blues, Appalachian folk traditions, which if you study theory, all used Common Practice — Baroque and Classical-era diatonic harmony as their melodic and harmonic language, turn of the 19th century music, where you don't deviate from the major and related minor scales, and if you do, you'd better be modulating or certain other restrictions apply.

When I first realised that I wanted to be a musician, the people I paid attention to, my first heroes, had already done all that stuff to death in their earlier bands. The music they decided to make instead wasn't looking to the Mississippi Delta or the Tennessee hollers.. more toward the music they’d grown up with on, say, the BBC Third Programme, or in the European concert hall: the composers writing for orchestra. Besides the artistic pretensions, or maybe we call them aspirations, this had the added benefit of more tension and more release than just four chords and Common Practice can give. But even for most of those bands, the harmonic vocabulary they utilized didn't really advance much beyond Beethoven — maybe it advanced as far as the Romantics, Chopin, Liszt, Tschaikovsky, Rachmaninov, but tension notes such as you might hear even in Debussy or Ravel were not a thing...

The interesting bands for me took their cues from the likes of Stravinsky and Bartók. Emerson was familiar with them, and a few I hadn't heard of before, like Gulda and Ginastera. The Canterbury composers probably leaned into the likes of Milhaud or Hindemith a little more than the more mainstream proggers did, people like Dave Stewart and Mont Campbell. And I don’t know how you come up with what Chick Corea so casually and joyously tossed off in every Rhodes or MiniMoog solo, without at least some knowledge of Bartók — Chick did cut several of Bartók's Bagatelles over the years. Maybe a passing familiarity with Slonimsky’s Thesaurus.

You admit that you’ve at least seen Slonimsky’s Thesaurus. Were other texts helpful as you came to understand what you were hearing?

Looking for light reading? I do have a copy of the Slonimsky, Ludmila Ulehla’s Contemporary Harmony, Leon Dallin’s book whose full mile-long title escapes me. They're all more than adequate for the likes of me and others who nerd out on these things, let alone the composition majors at the conservatories. But the really invaluable one that sticks with me is Vincent Persichetti’s Twentieth Century Harmony, which just lays it all out so logically and plainly, I think that one is required reading for anyone wanting to compose in this vein. William Russo's Jazz Composition And Orchestration had a wealth of advice for composing and arranging for a big band, and that's worked a treat once or twice so far.

I'll also mention one that hasn't been of as much service yet as I think it can or will be: Allen Forte’s Structure Of Atonal Music. Been struggling with that one for decades now, but I’ve been trying and failing to apply his ideas about set theory as it applies to the twelve tones of the chromatic scale into my own work. Maybe because I’m trying to adapt his work analysing atonality into a tonal framework. I actually like sonorous tonality, I like coming back to it if I allow myself to get into the weeds.. which I do from time to time; in the car listening to the latest mixes of the album, I'll frequently drive aimlessly and get myself lost just to see if I can find my way back to familiar ground.

The music that results from Forte's methods for aggregating cohesive theme and structure is hard going for someone who's not already used to that level of dissonance, but it’s a tool that others have mastered, and I feel I need to understand this tool in order to A, go places I wouldn’t have thought to go otherwise, and B, eventually be able to control the balance between tension and release with more nuance. I'll keep trying, a lot of it is maths and logic, and I'm good at the maths but kind of sketchy at the logic. I only just discovered that Forte has a text on Schenkerian analysis, and that might be a way in, I don't know.

Reminds me of the possibly anecdotal story of a conversation Leonard Bernstein had with Aaron Copland after Copland embraced serial writing in the latter stages of his writing career. Allegedly, Bernstein was all, why Aaron why? and Copland shrugged and said, Lenny, I need more chords, I ran out of chords.

Yeah, the New York Times reported that exchange did happen.. the Times was prone to journalism once upon a time. The experiment didn't seem to work though, Copland stopped writing altogether not long after, said it was like someone turned off a faucet. I guess the chords he was finding in serialism didn't inspire him to newer and better things. Maybe I'll have success similar to what Copland had with serialism, which is to say, not much. But I won't know unless I try.

When I'm gearing up to write something new, I ask the same questions other 20th century composers asked. Does a chord have to be a tower of three or maybe four donuts stacked in thirds and sixths, why can’t it be fourths and fifths, or seconds and sevenths? Do we need to play in just one key at any given time? Does it have to be diatonic or a mode of the diatonic, can’t we use another scale or one of its modes every so often? Must this be danceable, does it have to stay in 4/4 or 12/8? Why don’t we just end the song when it decides it wants to end rather than force it to stop after five minutes tops? Maybe we make writing about love in the most superficial fashion an option and not the default? It goes on from there. Theodore Sturgeon, you know, Sturgeon's Law, the guy who said that 90% of everything is crud, used to repeatedly insist that we ask the next question — because there is always a next question. And the one hanging over it all, of course, is: is any of that stuff even right for the song?

I think in the back of my mind, I'm continually asking, how do I take the listener on a journey from point A to point B, or point C, or D, or beyond? That seems to be an overarching theme in progressive music, and to finally come round and maybe answer your first question once and for all, it's probably the reason I still get a kick out of prog rock, and the reason I think prog is still as vital today as it was fifty years ago: there are still composers and musicians who think in terms of a voyage — cinematic sweep, like the concept albums we all know and love, or in miniature, dare I say like Microviews is — and want the largest possible vocabulary in which to convey these stories. I won't speak for any other prog bands, but handcrafting these journeys using every trick in the book is what Atfulcrum is about — pretentious as that may sound, though again, I'd use the term aspirational. I think there’s more to explore, more progress to be made, more nuance to be had.

Some would say nuance is the enemy. “It ain’t what they call rock and roll.”

(sighs) And the Sultans.. are playing creole. OK. The critics, who tried their best to kill prog rock in the 70s and largely succeeded, can go listen to punk for the rest of their lives, they're probably not my audience anyway. I don't mind punk, myself, but I like the kind of subtlety that lets you hear new things even on the twentieth listen through, so punk isn't really my jam.

But again, part of the process is knowing or intuiting when not to go there. ELP had the odd palate cleanser on just about every album — look at Brain Salad Surgery. If Emmo’s latest long-form work, say, Karn Evil 9, is a bit heavy or musically challenging for you, well here’s Greg Lake with an acoustic ballad, Still You Turn Me On, that wouldn’t be out of place on a Fairport record. Emmo himself might bust out a modified 12-bar blues like Benny The Bouncer. Another example, listen to Genesis' Nursery Cryme. Seven Stones, a heavy song about age and wisdom, followed up by Harold The Barrel, which plays a guy thinking about throwing himself off a building for chuckles. Yes used to encore with I'm Down — a modified 12-bar blues.

The second time I saw Allan Holdsworth at Toads in New Haven, the first song was all musical flash and outside playing — especially from the leader, who with his uncanny, dazzling technique could phrase like Coltrane on guitar, and did. I applauded. I applauded less energetically when the second song sounded rather like the first, less still when the third one did too. By the fourth song, I had to leave. After the barrage of four musicians playing at Warp Five pretty much non-stop, at jet airliner sound pressure levels, the late autumn wind blowing through the Yale quads on my way back to my car was music enough for that moment. And I'm a Holdsworth fan!

What I learned that night is that if everything is loud, then nothing is loud; if everything is fast, nothing is fast; if everything is harmonically abstract, without anything a bit more simplistic to leaven it and give the listener a clear feeling of having arrived somewhere, everything just blurs together. I read once that Dream Theater wanted their then-forthcoming album to be a statement of unrelenting aggression. I thought, full-on aggression for an hour plus? Some listeners have the stamina for that. Horses for courses. I've come to like somewhat more variety.

So, just because I can doesn’t mean I should. Not always. I can appreciate a twenty or thirty minute epic, but I like a good pop song too, I’m human, love songs do speak to me from time to time, and I do speak in love song here and there. Maybe I'm more prog-adjacent than prog rock.. I have the Keith Emerson, Neal Morse, Greg Spawton, Jem Godfrey side of me that wants to write longer works, and then I've got the Supertramp, 10cc, XTC, Ben Folds side that knows that at least some of the tricks Emmo would have used in a longer work aren't appropriate for the material at hand. It just.. is what it is. I mean, here's me asking you to pay some attention to my songs, some of which can run ten, fifteen minutes or more — maybe a four- or five-minute prog-adjacent pop song might not be out of order once in a while, a chance to catch your breath?

But if I can help it, even that five-minute tune should have something in there to make you go Hmmm. Maybe the Whizzo Quality Assortment contains a nugget of Crunchy Frog.

Or Spring Surprise. Let’s talk a bit about your history. You’re just on the other side of 60. Only a handful of people, mostly engineers and a few musician colleagues in North America and Europe, know who you are inside the industry. Where have you been hiding?

(visibly choosing his words carefully) Behind domestic issues mostly. Situations that only I was in a position to handle, I felt I couldn’t just shirk what I saw as a responsibility. Over time it involved a gradual decrease in playing out with my friends, and being in working bands, until by the pandemic I just couldn’t play out any more at all — except for one special show a year at Thanksgiving, for which it could be like moving heaven and earth to arrange for my absence from the house for a few days.

From a cursory read of the back cover of the Microviews CD, I'm going to guess that you're talking about Mike and the Muffin Tops and something called Vomitorium.

Yeah. The Muffin Tops were a highly visible cover band on the Connecticut Shoreline east of New Haven in the 'teens. Vomitorium is the annual Thanksgiving show in New Haven. But when COVID hit, I found myself homebound, not because I was immobile but because others around me were, over the course of ten years since coming back home from Los Angeles. My capabilities, stamina, and mental state finally became insufficient to the tasks required, and with the immeasurable help and love of my partner, I sought legal counsel to allow others to step in. I’m necessarily being vague about this, others might take issue with my version of events. But I was eventually able to relocate to my partner here in Oakland and pick the music up again, more or less full-time.

(brightening) Which led to this. Nine months ago, when I got to Oakland, I would not have foreseen my music being released with the backing of a huge media conglomerate. I'd have asked what you were smoking if you predicted it, and though it's been at least twenty years since my last joint I'd probably have asked you for a pull.

So, about your musical history...

My first actual memory out of the womb was laying on my stomach in front of a glowing box with people in it, in various registers of bluish grey. There were four of them, I remembered later — I couldn’t count yet, I was about to turn two in a month and a half or so, and it would be another three months before I began to learn to read. Three —

You were reading at two?

So I'm told. The second memory I have overall was a late summer backyard picnic at my aunt's place. One of my uncle's jovial in-laws was a high school teacher, and he delighted in telling me at every family gathering afterward that I was reading, if not quite comprehending, from a fifth-grade reading textbook. I do remember a book that wasn't like, say, Dr Seuss, no whimsical pictures, just straight text in small print, and reading aloud from it.

Anyway, four people in a glowing box, back to the first memory. Three of the people inside the box had machines strapped to their shoulders and were moving their hands across them, a fourth was sitting behind an array of pots and pans, whacking away and shaking his head in time. I heard a shrill noise in the background, which I later came to understand was excited shrieking. That made the almost two-year-old me go Hmmm.

The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, maybe?

Yeah. That by itself didn’t make me want to be a musician, but The Beatles and the rest of the British Invasion, especially The Who, that was the first music I was aware of, always in the background, always somewhere in the cultural zeitgeist. I only got to The Kinks later, and never really came around to The Stones — God bless 'em. I recall having a bit of a crush on Petula Clark — by then I was like four — but she had some fine songs that I paid attention to, the ones Tony Hatch wrote. The Monkees were on TV, and sunshine pop bands like The Association, Spanky And Our Gang, The Cowsills, and The 5th Dimension, some of the better pop tunesmiths like Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb.

I remember sitting in the back seat of a 1967 Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon hearing these songs and looking up through the window at palm trees silhouetted against a dusky sky at nightfall — we spent like six months in Los Angeles, which coincided with the Summer Of Love, and that scene really infiltrated my sensibilities even though I was five.

The Smothers Brothers made a point of having interesting and sometimes controversial musical guests like The Who, Joan Baez, or Pete Seeger. Other TV shows like Shindig, Hullabaloo, Lloyd Thaxton, Boss City, The Groovy Show, Playboy After Hours, American Bandstand, Sullivan. When we moved to Los Angeles, we lived with my aunt, and my older cousin was spinning acid rock bands like Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge, Jefferson Airplane, and later on, when we all moved back to Bridgeport, Sly and the Family Stone and CCR. Crosby Stills Nash and Young got onto my radar. Motown was in there somewhere, or at least I knew who The Four Tops and The Temptations were, and Stevie Wonder.

Seeing The Doors on Sullivan, I was fascinated by the guy with the granny glasses massaging what appeared to be an ironing board, but by then I was five, and I could connect that with some very interesting, piercing sounds happening at the same time — of course that was Ray Manzarek and whatever combo organ he had then, I guess it was a Vox Continental? Anyway I remember my cousin later hung big posters of Santana and Chicago Transit Authority on the walls, the huge ones that actually came with the LPs, back when that kind of promotion was a thing, and their music was interesting in the same way that Blood Sweat and Tears was. I heard War around this time too, after Eric Burdon left them, though I didn't fully appreciate their deft synthesis of rock, jazz, and Latin till much later.

Then! ABC broadcast California Jam in 1974 and I got my first taste of prog rock with ELP. Like the old beer ad said, you never forget your first, and Emmo was first to really energize me about music. After that, it was very much, "I don't always listen to ELP, Yes, and King Crimson, but when I do, so do the neighbours!" And my parents did too, like it or not.

As an 11- or 12- year old organist, I was, um, not being encouraged to learn any of the newer stuff. The teachers my parents paraded before me, at my parents’ behest, expected me to play hopelessly corny theatre organ arrangements from the 40s and 50s, popular tunes from that era; or setting Bach fugues before me on a spinet organ that just barely had an octave pedalboard when what I needed was two and a half octaves to even think about coordinating all four limbs to play Bach properly — which is something I sadly still can't do today.

My mom could carry a tune back in the day, and from time to time she sat in with a local big band in the Bridgeport area in the late 40s and early 50s, but no one else in my family was musical at all, although I heard rumors about my dad's uncle in West Virginia, and a mandolin. But by God my parents knew what they liked, and if they could help it I would damn well learn to like it too, in spite of myself if necessary. Never mind learning popular stuff like Won't Get Fooled Again, by then I'd also heard Chick, Joe (Zawinul), and Herbie (Hancock) — if my parents had their way my musical education would have stopped when songs were popular in the mid-40s. Three Coins In The Fountain, C'est Si Bon, Jalousie, I Cover The Waterfront.. I get hives just reciting the titles. I never did learn to enjoy playing that era of music, certainly not those lame arrangements. So I never practiced. And my teachers would invariably have the chat with my parents saying, this is pointless, you're wasting your money and my time.

My parents cut off my lessons and never ever encouraged me to be a musician thereafter, even after I started to make money at it and, after another eternity, finally found myself in something approaching demand. They didn't mind me spending my allowance on the 45 version of Marrakesh Express, or getting five singles for a buck in a cellophane bag from Woolworths; but they never saw performing as being my life, let alone composing; they actively tried to will it into not being my life. For them it was always an avocation that I needed to grow out of, not a seminal part of who I was, and am. I never saw composing, and to a slightly lesser degree performing, as anything but my life.. to the overall detriment of various professional careers I embarked upon to pay the bills and otherwise keep me in mad money.

I did try giving it up for the better part of a year when I was first married, thinking, I became a musician to find a woman, now I've got one, I can settle down into domesticity and adulting now. Yeah, about that... To her credit, my ex was always supportive of me and my music at least to the extent that it didn't infringe on our time together — which unfortunately it did, frequently.

You describe Atfulcrum as primarily a one-man operation. Are you actually slashing away at guitars and thumping the tubs in addition to the keyboard and production work?

I wish I were that clever. (considers) Let’s start with this: I was never an athlete. Always the last one chosen in pickup sandlot baseball games. When I heard ELP, Yes, King Crimson, Pink Floyd, RTF.. I knew right then that my path forward was not in being a jock anyway.

The ace up my sleeve through all this was that I have perfect relative pitch, so that if I needed to, I could transcribe the notes I heard on the records, or the sounds behind my eyeballs, into dots and donuts on a page of staff paper. That was how I learned, that and the textbooks, but having perfect relative pitch was honestly more effective, and of more utility, than any teacher my parents could have afforded.

That's twice now you've called it that. Perfect relative pitch.

Well, as I understand it, and I could be wrong, straight-up perfect pitch is when you can identify A-440, I don't always hear that fine a detail. You could play me 438 Hertz and I might still tell you it's 440. But I can definitely tell you it's supposed to be an A, relative to the A-flat or the A-sharp. I can often identify the chord progression on the Muzak speakers or the Tannoys. I inadvertently used that party trick to impress my partner on our first date, sitting in a Manhattan luncheonette.

Anyway, in order to try to get some of what I was hearing in my head out of my head or else go mad, I started doing sound-with-sound experiments with two cassette tape recorders and my old MicroMoog in the mid-70s.. building up a fair amount of tape hiss as I went. I’d heard that Stevie was producing his albums, Fulfillingness, Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, more or less by himself — not entirely true, TONTO collaborated, but not entirely false either, by and large he wasn't working with a band, he was the band. By then Paul McCartney had done two or three albums that way as well, Pete Townshend had, Todd Rundgren, John Fogerty, and of course Mike Oldfield — Tubular Bells made me light up. If I could get good enough at it, I thought, I could do it too — I became convinced that I would have to do it that way. For the moment I was relegated to two cassette decks rather than 32-track reel-to-reel like Oldfield had at his disposal, but because of social environment reasons, I didn’t feel like I had a choice.

Other musician friends let it be known that their interest in progressive rock approached zero from underneath. They were all hanging out at Ron’s Place and The Grotto in New Haven, getting the odd gig at The Bitter End or CBGB's, listening to and being in punk bands who neither needed nor even wanted keyboard players. Social environment reasons. (sighs) So, having been rejected for all the neighbourhood sports teams, and now rejected again for all the cool bands — that frankly I probably would've left sooner rather than later anyway out of sheer boredom even if they'd wanted me, and I know that sounds like sour grapes because it probably is — I set about learning to do everything myself, because that was the only way I could envision it getting done.

I examined how drummers produced the sounds they produced, what was possible for them to play, what was impossible. When I marched in high school I got acquainted with some of the basic rudiments — I was assigned the triple drums, the trios, because I was needed for the piano chair in jazz lab during the winter months, so I had to be part of the marching band, and I couldn't march around with a piano on my back. Guitar parts, bass lines — it's a learning curve getting things to sound more idiomatic of the actual instruments as opposed to a keyboard player voicing chords a guitarist would need seven or eight fingers on each hand to play, or a reach measured in feet rather than inches.

And as I went along I discovered that these different instruments were bringing out different aspects of my own musicality to the point that they have begun to develop personae in their own right. The guitarist wants to play jazz fusion. The drummer wants to have played with Zappa. The bassist thinks he's either the second coming of Jaco or Entwistle. They all have the fluidity to play in multiple styles, but if you ask them to go for what they know, that's where they'll head.

What about the keyboard player?

He just hopes people don't notice his many technical limitations. So he'll handwave with a creative texture here and a brash lead voice there. It's not important anyway, his main job is to compose the stuff.

I suspect you're feigning modesty. Why not just play drums, or guitar?

First, lack of soundproofing in a house where my parents were actively hostile to the very idea of me being a musician. Second, I'm a washout at it. I mentioned my failures at interpreting Bach before.. I've always had a weak left hand and a congenital inability to develop full hand or limb independence. Bruce Hornsby lays down a ridonkulously complex ostinato with his left hand and with his right he's blowing Bud Powell bebop, I watch him do it and shake my head, my brain just isn't wired for that. Terry Bozzio playing in 7 on the high hat, 5 on the snare, 9 on the toms, all at the same time.. sheesh. The Bach inventions and sinfonias were a nightmare for me to practice for that reason, which is a shame because if I could have gotten past that I'd be much better off as a keyboardist. Some of Carl Czerny's etudes where he's got you playing like a 7-tuplet in one hand and a 5-tuplet in the other.. I know it's possible, I've heard it done, I appreciate the work that went into it, but for me it just never clicked into place and I don't think it's going to now. On the other hand, I see Oscar Peterson tossing off solos in which both hands are doing 32nd-note runs in octaves at high speed, and that's not so much out of the realm of possibility for me, albeit that I have nowhere near his velocity or melodic imagination, plus my piano technique has always been really dodgy anyway, and on top of that my fingers are now mildly arthritic.

Back to the history. Somewhere in that era a colleague alerted me to a guy with a basement studio a couple of towns over, in Stratford, and I went with the idea of committing my songs to 8-track reel-to-reel tape. We arrived at a barter system where, on an as-needed basis, I would provide keyboard parts for his commercial and industrial soundtracks for advertising industry clients, and in return we'd track my music every so often. Along the way he got to be one of my closest friends, and we stuffed a lot of things into pipes together and made good coin in the late 80s and early 90s with his soundtracks and my session work playing the thornier parts — till the ad agencies decided en masse that it was cheaper to just license the use of pop songs rather than commission entirely new bespoke soundtracks. That pretty much sent my friend's whole business model circling the drain.

MIDI came along. I could store an entire arrangement in my sequencer before I had to start bouncing to the second tape deck. Less tape hiss. Production got easier still for me when I acquired a small Fostex 4-track cassette recorder, and as funds permitted I could always take my sequencer over to my friend's place in Stratford and record there on his 8-track.

But no one was willing to play my music live. In order to be a working musician and justify these four figure synthesisers I had by now acquired, I accommodated my friends instead, finally finding a niche playing in their bands, which ranged from mostly rock cover bands to original projects with folksy yacht-rocky stuff to power pop to nu-metal to jam band music, maybe one or two other genres I've long since forgotten or suppressed. In the original projects, I learnt early on that my songs would invariably turn the band into.. a completely different band. A graphic designer would look at a situation like that and say my songs were way, way out of gamut. Which was true. So I knew I'd eventually have to create my own color space, where my compositions were the gamut.

You mentioned the MicroMoog. Was that your first synth?

Yeah. Then through the 80s I brought in a Yamaha DX5, a couple of Oberheim Matrix-1000 rack modules, and an Ensoniq EPS that became my favourite controller keyboard, till the 3-1/2 inch SCSI floppy disk drive died and I couldn't find another to replace it — and you needed that to boot the OS, or an internal SCSI hard drive, which were also ungodly expensive. By the early 90s I'd bought a used Chroma Polaris and then a Kurzweil K-2000.

What was good about the EPS as a live controller? People generally don't think of the EPS in that light, when they think about it at all.

The way I could layer multiple timbres. It was possible to fill the eight instrument slots with dummy instruments, that weren't playing samples at all, but were still sending MIDI information, including poly aftertouch — I miss sending poly aftertouch — out to eight different channels, so one or two could go to my DX5, two could go to my Oberheims, I could even control a channel or two on the Kurzweil, which did respond to poly aftertouch when it came in over MIDI but, oddly, not internally from the keyboard. Some of the outboard modules didn't always play nicely — thinking here of the Matrices, which came out while Gibson was in the process of tanking Oberheim's reputation with dodgy builds and shoddy MIDI implementation — but when it worked, it worked well. And it worked, 95% of the time.

So by the mid-90s I'd finally attracted three other fellow travellers willing to jam interesting stuff out with me in rehearsal, and then allow me to wrangle those jams into actual songs as I saw fit, and to add lyrics. We’d play once a month at a small restaurant on York Street, on the fringes of the Yale campus, and at a gin joint up Whalley Avenue in Amity, closer to Southern Connecticut State. Both places long gone now. The owners dug what we were doing — no one else was attempting anything like it in New Haven. No one I knew wanted to. They were all still into punk, or moving into grunge and indie music, or similarly keyboard-free environments.

The band that played these two venues, that was Radiant City?

Yeah. (pause) As easily as I attracted them, I feel.. like I might have repelled them after a while too. Maybe it was just the siren song of settling down into good-paying jobs and domesticity — who would blame them? But I think another factor may well have been my own grand ambitions. I wanted to write, or assemble, longer, more imposing pieces, you know, have our own Supper's Ready, Gates Of Delirium, Karn Evil 9.. and some of that would've required reading multiple pages of dots and donuts. In hindsight I can see why that was a big ask, one the others opted not to indulge. Maybe they knew that a New Haven audience of our peers would not sit still long enough for that. I certainly didn't know. It wasn't a consideration on my part.

Anyway, a good chunk of the material the four of us generated became the first Atfulcrum album, Scenes From A Luminous City, about 15 years later — 2009 I think. Performed entirely by me, though out of respect and affection for them, I did my best to recreate their parts, rather than rearrange them to suit my proclivities. The guitarist may even have done some tracking for it, I don't remember too well now.

Radiant City became Fulcrum over time, and as the internet came in that morphed into @Fulcrum with the “at” symbol, and some time ago I just started to spell it out. Atfulcrum. I was thinking of Archimedes when I got the name Fulcrum: you know, “Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Since I didn’t consider myself the lever, but still wanted a role in the process of moving the world, I became the guy at the fulcrum of all the activity, the point on which the lever gets supported.

Yet, somewhat paradoxically, I never looked for other musicians, or for people to help engineer my stuff, although I did seek advice on recording, mixing, and mastering from kind and knowledgeable people on internet fora, people I'd seen on the credits of popular albums.. which led me to other cherished friendships with people all over the country and all over the world.

I carried on playing with cover bands and in open mic house bands around New Haven and the Shoreline east of there, even doing a few months with a group in Orange County when I was trying and failing to break into the LA studio scene in 2013, right up to the pandemic. By then I'd graduated to the first-gen Korg Kronos, a couple of remaindered Casio synths that weren't half bad as live keyboards but sucked in the studio, and later a Mac Mini running Mainstage with two controller keyboards when the Kronos died.

How do you kill a Kronos? That thing is built like a tank.

You play it under a blazing hot sun in the middle of a typically hot, ghastly, humid Connecticut summer, and no picnic tent above you to shield you or the Kronos from the light and the heat beating down on its aluminium chassis. Even having a 15" fan running full blast under it didn't help, it was pushing triple digits on the thermometer and we were inland from Long Island Sound, playing on a black asphalt basketball court, and it was like walking through soup. The motherboard got baked. I was just about ready to retire it to the home studio, too — I loved the sounds and the flexibility, but it weighed a metric ton. My shoulders are still kind of sore from hauling it around, six years on from when it last powered up. I moved to the Mac Mini and the controllers and didn't miss a beat. All this happened with the Muffin Tops.

And among my new musical cronies in the years before COVID hit, I acquired a reputation of being the secret weapon, the Swiss Army Knife, the guy you maybe don't notice so much when he's there but you might notice when he isn't. The classic rock jukebox with arms and legs. I have a comparatively comprehensive knowledge of the classic rock hymnal, in addition to some decent knowledge of the prog rock songbook, and an idea of the sounds needed to play those songs, and I still have my perfect relative pitch to learn things somewhat quickly. That has come in handiest for the annual Vomitorium show, lately.

By the time the pandemic hit, I had two more albums and an EP under my belt — the two Describing An Arc records, and the Decline And Fall EP. My partner and I started a peripatetic side project called Chiron Return in order to collaborate — the good stuff was very good indeed, like I said she's an awesome songwriter in her own right, she also sang on the first Arc album. The EP surprised me and jumped the queue in 2018 while I was starting to assemble Microviews.

Surprised you? Jumped queue?

The idea for it and the writing of it came quickly, moreso than anything I'd done before or since. I was still working on the second Arc album, but I'd also been working on Microviews since 2014, curating work I'd done in my first few years participating in February Album Writing Month putting out 14 songs, or trying to, during the 28 days of the month. Most if not all of Microviews was done for FAWM or one of its adjunct projects, I think one showed up in a 50/90. But the entire concept for Decline And Fall just hit me one restless, sleepless night, and five songs sprang out of it that were both interesting for me to listen to afterward, and appropriate to 2018 and circumstances here in America. I might add, from my perch here more to the left hand side of the aisle, pertinent to today, even. I should see about getting it back into print.

How does all this new material translate to the stage?

(sighs) I don't know. I got so used to working alone that it seems alien to think about turning this into an actual band again, so.. I probably won't. (pause) I’ve thought about it.. but as a spectator, I can’t think of very much that's more boring. Look, if a guy as talented as Thomas Dolby, alone on a stage with his catalogue, his synthesizers, and his videos — if he makes me fidget without a band to play off, what chance do I have with my catalog? Todd Rundgren in the mid-80s using a Mac Plus as his backing band — I left that show unimpressed. I mean, I love me some Todd, and he gets an E for the effort, but him touring by himself is nowhere near as engaging as he is with a band. Same with Dolby.. and I was fortunate enough to see Dolby with a band.

Elton John toured with just a piano and Ray Cooper.

Well.. his songs are all piano-based anyway. As good as Davey (Johnstone), Dee (Murray), and Nigel (Olsson) were, Elton could still get away with stripping the guitars and the drums out of the arrangement — he didn't have to have Cooper up on stage with him but good job that he did, because Cooper is highly entertaining to watch. But while Elton always had a cracking band with him on the road, it's still possible to get at least 75% of the way there if it's just him, his charisma, his voice, and the piano, all of which are iconic in their own right. The first time I heard Your Song it was just him and the piano, I guess it was 1970 on Andy Williams' show or something, I'm probably wrong about the host. But I was still spellbound, I did seek out the 45 afterward. As an added bonus, Take Me To The Pilot was the B-side.

Now, when it comes to poor, myopic me, I can't shake the notion that my songs are built around the arrangements, which do include guitar noises and drum noises, and in some cases very specific synth noises, and I've got to hear those things as part and parcel of the song. Because I get the arrangement along with the song, it's something wired in me about how the song first presents itself. I hear kernels of these songs a certain way in my head before I ever fire Logic up, and the arrangement in my head becomes what I guess you'd call the Platonic ideal that I work toward as I produce.. which is part of why it takes me a while to get music out into the wild. I'm constantly forgetting that mixes are never finished, they're only ever abandoned.

Anyway, for the same reason that you wouldn't ask a pianist to go out and play, say, a Rachmaninov concerto without the orchestra to accompany her, I'd have a hard time considering how to play these songs without those sounds, or similar ones from real musicians — provided I could even find real musicians to play them. I mean, if I were watching Atfulcrum, I'd want to see more than just a bloke on stage busking to backing tracks, sat behind a third-gen Kronos (which is my latest axe). That's better suited to the promo video than the stage.

So I doubt I’m going to take this live in future, unless the stars align and there’s a big honkin’ budget attached. A prog cruise, a festival, a one-off show? Yeah.. maybe. Even then, the logistics.. there’d have to be money involved for a six-piece band behind me to rehearse and then do the show — including another keyboardist so that I can front the band from time to time, and who would handle the trickier parts I can't negotiate any more — the front of house engineer, lighting designer, crew, and so on — and after all that I’d still want a chance at making some money back for myself and the investors. What are the odds? All that's difficult enough, just for one show.

Now, actual touring, that’s right out of the question, as far as I'm concerned that’s a young man’s game.

Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger aren’t exactly young men.

Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger have had the luxury of having done this for sixty years, during which they built support infrastructures in place that allow them to do it every so often, and it’s nothing they’re not used to. I’m starting from scratch here, and the industry has changed somewhat from when the Beatles and the Stones first signed. Don’t let my boyish good looks fool you, I am in my early 60s. I’ve been making music for a long time in southern Connecticut, under everyone’s radar, the secret weapon — emphasis on secret. I haven’t been able to gather the support necessary to present Atfulcrum onstage, and because this is prog-adjacent art rock we're talking about, desirable and palatable to a small fraction of the music-buying audience, I'm not optimistic that I'll ever gain that kind of leverage. I’ve never had to experience the grind of a tour, and everyone I know who has experienced it tells me that grind is the proper word for it. And some hypothetical promoter wants me to get up to that speed now?

Look, The Beatles spent the last half of their existence together in the studio without undue consideration over how to render the music live. Harry Nilsson was a studio rat, he could have played live any time he wanted to, but he seldom wanted to. Kate Bush didn't exactly go out of her way to tour. Of course Steely Dan, when they were writing their most celebrated music in the late 70s, or XTC in the late 80s and early 90s. I’m content to keep Atfulcrum as a studio entity and let these versions of these songs be their definitive representation — even though I know from experience that there’d be limitless possibilities for musical growth under live circumstances, and with the right band of brothers and sisters not only would the songs blossom but so would the musicians playing them. For now I’ll just say: all things are possible, never say never.. but understand, the right dominoes have to fall the right way, and I don’t know that I’d put money on it coming to pass.

Right, what's next for Atfulcrum, if not the all-conquering world tour?

Well I've got two albums in play at the moment, both programmatic, somewhat linear stories that will both result in what the kids call concept albums. I don't know which of the two will insist on finishing first, so I'm paying attention to both in hopes that one gets done within the next year or so, and then the other the year after. It's like pushing two shopping carts at once down the aisle at the Safeway.

Any hints as to what we may expect?

Maybe the least I could say is that if Microviews turns out to be your cup of tea, expect more of that along with an actual linear narrative, and maybe a side quest or two into other zones.

Do you have anything else to declare?

You know, finally having the opportunity to potentially get this music out in front of a wider audience really feels like a — a vindication of forty-plus years of mostly being in the wrong place at the right time, and keeping my nose to the grindstone anyway. I'm grateful to Lux Intus for taking a chance on me, and Jack for being a champion of this music.

Lots of loose ends from the Q Questionnaire

The Q Questionnaire was a good place to start drawing answers out of Rick, but we wanted to dig a little deeper. So we followed up with a few prompts.. and got far more than we bargained for. Far, far more. We mean, way too much more.