Dear friends, music lovers and passers-by,
Today I finished the first blog in many months—and this lacuna in addressing you in an epistolary way was due to the sheer amount of live shows we played for the Darkblue anniversary project: a small idea which suddenly inflated into almost a full-fledged weekend tour, including a few shows abroad.
Now it’s time to talk about how it all went, ruminate on what we’ve become, and what comes next.
Darkblue, if you missed this entire thing, was an album which we—or rather, I, as it was still a solo project at the time—released in 2015 under the Melodic Revolution Records label. It was a love story which, at the time, seemed like a promise of the future, and it eventually became our most successful work to date, including such unlikely accolades as reaching the Top 50 Prog Albums of the Year according to the ProgArchives readers’ poll.
Darkblue reissue
Fast forward to 2024: I found myself experiencing something of a burnout following the departure of our then-drummer Paul De Smet (featured on Skywound and Live in Ghent), who has since built a successful career blending jazz and hip-hop influences, as well as pianist Umut Eldem, who needed more time for his professorial duties at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp. Although the band ended both collaborations on great and friendly terms, the changes still had their impact, and I took some time to reconsider my needs and wants.
One of the last shows with Skywound programme
It was one day at the sauna that I suddenly had the idea that combining live music with real-time illustration was something nobody else had really done before. So I contacted an artist whose work I had been following for a while—and thus the collaboration between Fiobos Gkoubras and ourselves became the foundation of the initial anniversary edition of the studio version of Darkblue, released in 2025 together with Fiobos’ visualizations (which you can all find here).
Then, finally, Mauro Belmans became our new force behind the drums, helping our sound evolve and pushing it in a direction I hadn’t anticipated. And thus the anniversary tour rethinking Darkblue became a reality.
Mauro during our show in France
In parallel with plotting the roadmap for future shows, Fiobos and I decided to push the physical artifact of Darkblue beyond a simple album reissue. Thus, the print-on-demand and digital book, based on his illustrations and live drawings alongside my poetry and notes surrounding Darkblue, was released through Amazon. I’m very proud of Fiobos for taking his work further than either of us anticipated, and I highly recommend that you at least take a look at it—especially if you missed our shows and had no chance to obtain one of his works fresh off the easel.
Fiobos drawing a potrait in real time on stage as illustration for the song
The tour then happened. What we initially thought would be a few one-off curiosities took us through a wonderfully varied array of clubs and cultural venues, amounting to more than seventeen dates. We played everywhere from small, intimate underground art clubs such as Black Flamingo and Pepperfabriek, to iconic Belgian live music cafés of every imaginable size, like Libertad and Hell, as well as larger venues such as De Claude, Club 9, and the French venue La Bécane.
We were happily surprised that most of the shows exceeded our expectations in terms of attendance, and along the way we made many friends, sharing the stage with bands such as For The Witch, ZiELErUsT, Vloed, Leni Ark, and Opal in Sky, among many others.
Now, what’s next?
We already know—and we’re already working on it.
The next blog, scheduled for publication towards the middle or end of June, will offer glimpses and details of our upcoming project. We can already tell you this much: it is exciting, it is dark, and it is as new for us as it will be for you. It will also be fully in the spirit of what Transport Aerian has always been known for: treading into the uncharted, remaining personal, and being nonchalantly ourselves.
As always.
Hamlet.
