Progressive Rock Band Kajoshin present “Chrisalys”
“2021 – Kajoshin – “CHRISALYS” album “…the tracks on an album must complement and contrast one another… this creates the emotional tension required to pique the listener’s interest…”
This is what Adrian Belew, guitarist, and singer of King Crimson, stated in the early 1980s.
This quote fits perfectly with Kajoshin’s compositional philosophy. The Italian band, after a period of inactivity, is back in the game with an album almost entirely composed by its leader, guitarist and singer Claudio Russo. The year 2020, with the outbreak of the pandemic and the lockdown forcing people to stay indoors for months at a time, is a perfect time to get ideas together and find new awareness.
The tracks on the album include unreleased compositions created with the old line-up and others written from scratch during the lockdown period. The form is that of the concept, so dear to the progressive bands of the 1970s such as King Crimson, Yes, Genesis, and Pink Floyd: the work is seen as an ‘initiatory journey, a life journey, an adventure, which catapults us into ourselves, and as with every journey, we never return home quite the same as before. Psychedelia, progressive, stoner rock, experimentation but also songwriting are the ingredients of the album, mixed in a personal and unified style. The world, since that fateful year 2020, is no longer the same as before, and the title ‘Chrisalys’ encapsulates this change: we are all by our nature in perpetual evolution, and this moment we are living through pushes us to accelerate. From a caterpillar, we must become a beautiful butterfly.