An Endless Sporadic
Magic Machine
Independent Release
2016
An Endless Sporadic are a project that began more than a decade ago in Houston, TX when Zach Kamins (guitars/keys) and Andy Gentile a drummer and video game professional, started jamming together. Although Kamins left Houston for Boston to enlist at the Berklee Music School and Gentile did move away to Cali to work for the now defunct Neversoft, they kept tinkering and exchanging ideas through the net. Their quite random and always additive nature of composing and working on songs gave them their name and they even managed to include one of the earlier songs in one of the games Andy worked on, putting an A in front of it, to make it to the top of the list of songs. Nifty…
Well around that time, Neversoft did work on guitar here and guess, who was on that. A lot of the stuff the band worked very sporadically on actually made in on an EP called “Ameliorate”. So far so good.
The EP did quite well on the back of their unique promotional opportunity, ending up covering the costs for the release of their eponymous album. Being a fan of The Flower Kings and Roine Stolt by extension, the band got him to produce that while using Flower’s bassist, Jonas Reingold for those sessions. Obviously, whatever happened at Lund, Sweden, steered the band a lot in a similar direction of old school prog, but still the more modern influences seem to rear up and take centre stage on occasion. Also if you imagined that some of the songs from that album became available for download, you‘d be, incidentally, correct.
Kamins left Berklee midway to form a band with Gentile back in LA, enlisting Tony Solis on guitar and Kfir Melamid on bass. Then Kamins had a change of heart and decided to go back to Boston to graduate, which he did after two more years. When he came back and decided to give the band another go; he enlisted the aid of a new bassist Eloy Palacios, as a trio this time, losing the second guitar. Then drummer Andy decided to move back to Houston, thus putting the project on ice once more. A few demos were done with Matt Graff, a college friend of Kamins’s, but nothing more. Then all the while Kamins was making over his studio and building a quick access library to work with on a variety of film scoring studios, experimenting with that, made him come up with a bunch of material that he felt was “AES” like in nature, so after pre-producing them, he got a hold of people like Navene-K on drums, Jonas Reingold on bass, and even managed some guest appearances of Jordan Rudess and Roine Stolt. All of the orchestral parts were replaced by live players and are quite great sounding.
So An Endless Sporadic’s newest album sounds a lot Theater-esque in places, but it also has all those 70s moments of Camel, ELP, Kansas and what not influences that make it a lot more interesting… let’s say that the show-offish Theateresque rhythm portions are my least favorite to the point I could have done without, but there are some pretty glorious melodies to be found in tracks like “Galactic Tactic” and “The Assembly”, while other songs have quite interesting portions too ie the simpler sections of “Finding the Falls”. “Impulse II” is a nice trade off between melody and virtuoso show off.
If you like enjoy prog rock and metal, this is not going to displease you and it’s better than your average band that tries too hard to sell itself alone on “atmosphere” as it also contains its fair share of virtuosic flair…
Well around that time, Neversoft did work on guitar here and guess, who was on that. A lot of the stuff the band worked very sporadically on actually made in on an EP called “Ameliorate”. So far so good.
The EP did quite well on the back of their unique promotional opportunity, ending up covering the costs for the release of their eponymous album. Being a fan of The Flower Kings and Roine Stolt by extension, the band got him to produce that while using Flower’s bassist, Jonas Reingold for those sessions. Obviously, whatever happened at Lund, Sweden, steered the band a lot in a similar direction of old school prog, but still the more modern influences seem to rear up and take centre stage on occasion. Also if you imagined that some of the songs from that album became available for download, you‘d be, incidentally, correct.
Kamins left Berklee midway to form a band with Gentile back in LA, enlisting Tony Solis on guitar and Kfir Melamid on bass. Then Kamins had a change of heart and decided to go back to Boston to graduate, which he did after two more years. When he came back and decided to give the band another go; he enlisted the aid of a new bassist Eloy Palacios, as a trio this time, losing the second guitar. Then drummer Andy decided to move back to Houston, thus putting the project on ice once more. A few demos were done with Matt Graff, a college friend of Kamins’s, but nothing more. Then all the while Kamins was making over his studio and building a quick access library to work with on a variety of film scoring studios, experimenting with that, made him come up with a bunch of material that he felt was “AES” like in nature, so after pre-producing them, he got a hold of people like Navene-K on drums, Jonas Reingold on bass, and even managed some guest appearances of Jordan Rudess and Roine Stolt. All of the orchestral parts were replaced by live players and are quite great sounding.
So An Endless Sporadic’s newest album sounds a lot Theater-esque in places, but it also has all those 70s moments of Camel, ELP, Kansas and what not influences that make it a lot more interesting… let’s say that the show-offish Theateresque rhythm portions are my least favorite to the point I could have done without, but there are some pretty glorious melodies to be found in tracks like “Galactic Tactic” and “The Assembly”, while other songs have quite interesting portions too ie the simpler sections of “Finding the Falls”. “Impulse II” is a nice trade off between melody and virtuoso show off.
If you like enjoy prog rock and metal, this is not going to displease you and it’s better than your average band that tries too hard to sell itself alone on “atmosphere” as it also contains its fair share of virtuosic flair…