Disappointingly for many prog fans, especially those who bought full weekend tickers before the bill was announced, the Prog Stage at RMF is just on the Sunday this year, with a hard rock stage taking its place on the Saturday. Fortunately single day tickets are available.

The worlds of progressive rock and classical choral music collide yet again with this Icelandic choral piece sung by Marjana Semkina of Iamthemorning.

As he says on the crowdfunding page:

An incredible luck and honour, it gave me hope that I might spark your interest with something different – an instrumental album. With several years in the making, this project became the essence of everything I enjoy as a musician. Classical piano, ethnic influences, electronic oddness, minimalism, art-rock and fusion – all blend together.

I put together a group of amazingly talented musicians to help bring this all to life, and I am sure the names will get you excited. To keep things interesting, I asked them all to unleash their creative freedom, so be prepared for unique and wild. Also, for all you audiophiles out there, I’m preparing a special high resolution treat.

The project is well on its way, and the piano recording is already scheduled at the same amazing Moscow studio that brought you piano of the Lighthouse.

And on Twitter Gleb is promising it will be epic,

5: Crippled Black Phoenix – Bronze

After some rather turbulent times within the band, Crippled Black Phoenix bounce back very strongly with a powerful follow-up to 2014′s “White Light Generator”. Beginning with a track called “Dead Imperial Bastard”, Bronze is a dark, angry and very intense record that in places sounds like Swans jamming with Pink Floyd, filled with dense, boiling guitars and ominous electronic soundscapes. It’s the sort of record that leaves you exhausted by the time you reach the end.

4: The Pineapple Thief – Your Wilderness

The Pineapple Thief have always represented the streamlined modern face of progressive rock, and this album is a distillation of the best elements of their sound. There are moments of fragile beauty, times when they rock out, and the whole thing flows seamlessly. The band have always drawn comparisons with Radiohead. But while “A Moon Shaped Pool” is a good album, “Your Wilderness” is a better one. But you have to wonder how many mainstream critics who put Radiohead high in their end-of-year lists have even heard “Your Wilderness”.

3: Opeth – Sorceress

Mikael Ã…kerfeldt and his band continue to draw deep from the well of 70s underground rock and reinvents the sounds for the 21st century with his legendary mastery of rock dynamics. The result is a record that invokes the spirit of that decade while sounding like something that could only have been made today. It goes from thunderous heaviness to the sort of sinister and cinematic atmospherics that recalls his Storm Corrosion collaboration with Steven Wilson. This is their best album since “Watershed” and despite the lack of death-metal growls, their heaviest since “Ghost Reveries”.

2: Iamthemorning – Lighthouse

The third studio album from the Russian duo comprising singer Marjana Semkina and classical pianist Gleb Kolyadin is one of those records that’s near-impossible to classify. Sometimes accompanied by a small chamber orchestra, sometimes with a rock rhythm section including Porcupine Tree’s Gavin Harrison and Colin Edwin, the result is a kaleidoscopic record of ever changing moods taking in rock, classical and even instrumental jazz. Comparisons between Marjana Semkina vocals and those of Kate Bush are entirely appropriate. This is a record that takes a few listens to fully appreciate since there’s so much to take in; you can keep hearing new things even after many listens.

2016 has been a terrible year for deaths, but it’s also been a tremendous year for new music. The underground progressive rock scene has produced many great albums from bands as diverse as Mantra Vega, Knifeworld, Haken, Iamthemorning, Purson, Frost* and Big Big Train. The mainstream has come up with some impressive prog-friendly records too, with David Bowie, Suede and Radiohead amongst them. And that’s before we even start on what’s come out of the world of metal.

So, what’s you record of the year so far? What other records have impressed a lot?