Born Again

Just when Astra looked like prog’s next stars, the band’s spark fizzled out. Ten years after his last album, Conor Riley returns with Birth, plugging into the cosmos and making the music he loves for its own sake. Prog catches up with him to discuss reinvention and his new band’s debut record, Born.

David West

It might be an obvious analogy but Born, the excellent debut from San Diego’s Birth, marks a rebirth of sorts. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Conor Riley and guitarist Brian Ellis set the prog and psych scenes alight a decade ago with Astra, releasing two acclaimed albums with 2009’s The Weirding and 2012’s The Black Chord. They toured the UK and Europe and seemed poised to be the next big thing in Mellotron-drenched euphoric prog, but then it all went very quiet. What happened to the bright young things? “I guess that’s the big question,” says Conor Riley. “Honestly, I can only speculate. Most of us still talk quite a bit, but at some point, we just went on a tacit hiatus, and we haven’t really been able to revive the spirit…

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Prog (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 132

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