Progressive Rock
Self-released · 1 May 2026
“Overflow” is about water and takes that as far as the instrument list: Rob Harrison plays saxes, flutes, recorders, glass bottles and percussion made by slapping water. Forty-four minutes across eight tracks following a river down the mountains of an imaginary island, with the title of the second piece, “Mariposa Falls”, marking where the focus sits. It opens with “Tributaries”, nine and a half minutes, and closes with “Delirium”, eight minutes twelve: the two long pieces are the two ends of the journey, and nothing in between reaches six.
Harrison is from Swansea and plays sax in Z Machine, the band that released “Merging Worlds” in September 2023. This is his second solo record, after “Explode My Head”, and he made it almost single-handed — Eliseo Salverri on drums, guests on harp and violin — and mixed it himself as well. The sax is the lead voice, which puts the album in a specific corner of prog: the influences he lists himself are Gong, King Crimson and the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and of Jethro Tull, the easy comparison for a man with a flute, there’s no trace. You can also hear that one person played nearly all of it, and not always to the album’s benefit: it stacks layers rather than making them answer each other, which is the price of overdubbing your own winds.
“Upstream” (three minutes twenty-six) and “Downstream” (three minutes twenty-nine) are the same piece and its reversal. The exercise is hard to pull off and the concept justifies it on paper, but that’s seven of the album’s forty-four minutes spent on an idea that explains better than it holds up. The rest delivers what the concept promises: the styles shift constantly and none of the eight tracks repeats the formula of the one before, so the forty-four minutes pass without the record pooling anywhere. It’s an author’s recording, made outside any label, and it sounds exactly like that.
Rating: 7.0/10
Text by Guillem Cardós