the story of frost* and me starts many years ago, at new year’s eve, when a friend gave me a promo version of their debut album milliontown. this turned out to be a nice progressive rock act, led by a songwriter who usually writes pop pieces, for example for the atomic kitten, who decided to go back to his roots and do some progressive rock. one very nice piece from this album is no me no you:

the album ends with a 26 minutes long song called milliontown, a really beautiful piece of prog:

after disbanding in 2006, they came together back in 2007 and released another album in 2008 called experiments in mass appeal, which i don’t like as much as the first album though.

kauan is a band from russia, whose lyrics are in finnish and russian. starting as a folk/doom metal band, they continuously changed their style and now fit into the post rock category. i randomly stumbled about one of their albums on amazon, since for some reason one of their album was wrongly labelled as an album by mar de grises. i liked the songs i tried on youtube, especially orkidea from their second album tietäjän laulu. orkidea is a rather calm song, with heavy guitars only appearing seldomly:

another very beautiful piece is valveuni from their newest album, aava tuulen maa. beautiful melodies and soundscapes await the listener:

finally, here’s a piece from the first album lumikuuro, showing the darker, doomier side of the band’s past. opposed to the above two songs, this one contains growls:

some years ago, while browsing my back then favourite cd shop, i stumbled about an album by a band called capricorns, having the somewhat strange name river, bear your bones, with songs such as broken coffin of the venerable king. when trying to look at the lyrics to see what they are writing about, i noticed that there are no lyrics. so i tried that album out, and was greeted by a 30 seconds beep, which then evolutes into a nice instrumental rockscape. i enjoyed it so much that i bought the whole album. here’s the first track:

the second piece i want to present is a song from their debut album, called comrades in tears. this one comes with a nice video with many time lapses:

the first post in this new project features the italian gothic metal band lacuna coil, featuring the two vocalists cristina scabbia and andrea ferro. most of their songs are very melodic, often powerful, featuring a beautiful mix of female and male vocals. the first song i want to present is fragments of faith from their 2008 album karmacode, my favourite lacuna coil album. a powerful song with a beautiful melody:

as a contrast, here’s a slower, also very beautiful piece from the 1999 album in a reverie. this is one of the songs which really fascinated me and caught my interest in the band:

finally, here’s a music video for the karmacode album song within me, which has a more typical tempo for lacuna coil songs:

note that their style changed a bit over the years, as for so many bands. while i really like the development leading to karmacode, i don’t like their newest album shallow life that much, though it’s still very good.

musikwiese is a new long term project of mine. its predecessor, the music video series in my main blog, the spielwiese, apparently was interesting to more than zero persons (excluding me), so i hope this project will also be of interest.

the aim is to present one artist every few days, by presenting some of their tunes and some text of mine. almost all of the pieces of music presented here can be found in my cd collection.

naturally, my collection includes a lot of rock and metal and many of its subgenres, but there are also some exceptions here and there. you’ll see. (and some of you already saw during the music video series.)

please enjoy!