EPK – Phaeton – Neurogenesis (2025)
Publicist Jon Asher – Jon[@]ashermediarelations[.com]
For fans of Mastodon, Meshuggah, Anciients, Between the Buried and Me, Devin Townsend
““Neurogenesis” is a continuation of the sounds we’ve established on our first two albums, with more of a focus on concision without sacrificing the imagination. We’ll carry you away to the nebulae, and you’ll enjoy every light-minute of it. Visceral thrill and intellectual expansion, song after song after song.” – Phaeton
Band: Phaeton
Album Title: Neurogenesis
Label: INB Music
Release Date: October 24, 2025
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“Hailing from picturesque Kimberly, British Columbia — which is actually closer to Montana’s Glacier National Park than anywhere geographically challenged Americans might have heard of in British Columbia — comes progressive metal quartet Phaeton. Earlier this year the band released their third full-length, Neurogenesis a collection of songs with dizzying and intricate salutations to Cynic, BTBAM, Meshuggah and fellow BC-ers Anciients (who hail from the more recognizable Vancouver). Today we present the play through video of the album’s fourth single “Augmented.” Normally, we frown upon play through videos around these parts, but gave Phaeton a mulligan because not only does the track rule in a structured ‘tear-that-math-textbook-up!’ sort of way, but also because it reminds us a teensy bit of the classic Animusic digital video series.” – Decibel Magaizne (Augmented Video Premiere)
“”Neurogenesis” one of the hottest tips of the running season. At least when it comes to instrumental prog, the band has reached the top of the annual list!” – PowerMetal.de
“Oh prog-metal how we love thee…case in point, the new single ‘Isochron ft. Derek Sherinian’ from Phaeton. This dandy little slice of modern prog-metal is not only exceptionally recorded but is jammed full of stabbing riffs, fluid bass lines, drum rolls galore and of course keyboard wizardry courtesy of the legendary Derek Sherinian (Dream Theater, Planet X, Sons of Apollo). Keep an eye out for the new album “Neurogenesis” from PHAETON set to drop on Oct. 24th and to tide you over listen up for ‘Isochron’ on your Home for the Best New Rock… W-J-O-EEEE” – WJOE – Findlay’s Home for Rock & Roll
“I’ve always maintained that instrumental bands have to work harder at their craft, because the lack of vocals is one more thing they have to find a replacement for. Lead guitar breaks can take the place of vocals, as can keyboards. They do a solid job of this on the album… They have the chops, that’s for sure.” – Metal-Temple”Neurogenesis“ is a work that combines virtuosity, atmosphere and emotion in extraordinary balance.” 4/5 – MetalUnderground.at
“PHAETON’s Neurogenesis: Where Prog-Meets-Precision, and Machines Whisper to the Riffs” – Papy Jeff Metal
“Phaeton’s sound is a kaleidoscope of progressive sounds, tech-death, thrash and djent… The album opens with the song “Tethys Rising” has in it’s a lot of austerity, but you can hear perfectly strong and expressive here sound and style. Song “Discontinuum” also holds the right one level and very exciting. The dynamics and rhythm are impressive here. Piece “Isochron” with the guest participation of Derek Sherinian, he enriches and has in great riffs, but there are also Middle Eastern elements, which it also increases the effect. Number “Synethesia” it emphasizes even more the intensity and complexity of sounds with a lot of power and energy. Track “Arachnid” he has a lot of neoclassical playing, but he doesn’t forget about it crushing playing with lots of thrills. Song “Augmented” it also has a specific level to it. Title piece “Neurogenesis” he crowns the album with pride and precision. You can hear perfectly balanced music here, which has a claw, feistiness and focuses on diversity and versatility. 4/5″ – W-Mgnieniu-Rocka
“An instrumental quartet from Kimberley, British Columbia, Phaeton are skillfully blurring the boundaries between old- and new-school prog metal. Their second album, Between Two Worlds, covers a vast amount of ground, from intricate post-djent riffing, to indulgent prog pomp, and no single outstays its welcome. The nine-minute title track is a particularly impressive display of showboating and smart songwriting.” – Prog Mag – Dom Lawson (Between Two Worlds – 2023)
It’s Prog Mag’s brand new Tracks Of The Week! (April 21, 2023) – “Hailing from Columbia, Canada’s Phaeton are an interplanetary instrumental heavy prog metal quartet and as their name suggests, they are fascinated with astronomy, and the idea of life itself, in all its beauty and wonder and majesty, emerging from an instant of catastrophic cosmic violence. The epic Between Two Worlds is the title track of the band’s latest album.” (Between Two Worlds – 2023)
“Top-tier instrumental prog-metal-math music from the East Kootenay region performed by a quartet of veteran musicians.” – Stuart Derdeyn (The Vancouver Sun) (Between Two Worlds – 2023)
“Phaeton are relatively unknown, especially compared to the above mentioned bands (scale The Summit, Animals as Leaders), but they definitely hold their own on Between Two Worlds. All members absolutely kill it on their instruments, the songs are wonderfully arranged and produced, and there’s plenty of variety here to hold our attention. Instrumental prog might be a little talked about genre, but Phaeton belong in the conversation.” – Heavy Music Headquarters (Between Two Worlds – 2023)
“…a killer album indeed, wonderfully arranged and produced; a superb prog metal opus where the music almost makes you dizzy, but most of all longing for more indeed. “Between Two Worlds” to me is one of the absolute highlights of this year, a unique twist and rollercoaster of progressive, instrumental metal, highly recommended indeed: especially suitable for fans of Rush, Dream Theater and Liquid Tension Experiment. Play it LOUD and you will be hooked, listening tip: “Monsoon.”” – Rock United (Between Two Worlds – 2023)
“”Between Two World” was very competently arranged and recorded by PHAETON. Prog fans, who like sounds and virtuosity above all, will be well served with the disc.” – PowerMetal.de (Between Two Worlds – 2023)
“PHAETON releases an instrumental album in which the voice is not lacking; a nervous, boosted opus where the frank and limpid musicality makes you dizzy, where the notes invite you to travel in space to another dimension, where harmony is combined with controlled djent power; innovative music, on modern math metal-prog.” – Profil Prog (Between Two Worlds – 2023)
“If you’re open minded in your choice of Metal genres, you should feel free to let this instrumental work slip through your ears. It takes a little getting used to, so completely without singing. But if you get involved and listen carefully, one or the other will surely like something. The whole thing should appeal to fans of RUSH or DREAM THEATER.” – Hellfire Magazin (Between Two Worlds – 2023)
“The sound on all seven tracks is huge and if there was a “best sounding hammer-ons” award then March of the Synthetics could be a contender.” – Stuart Derdeyn (The Vancouver Sun) (Self-titled – 2018)
Band: Phaeton
Album Title: Neurogenesis
Label: INB Music
Release Date: October 24, 2025
Track Listing:
1. Tethys Rising (6:25)
2. Discontinuum (6:37)
3. Isochron (4:12) ft. Derek Sherinian
4. Synethesia (6:24)
5. Arachnid (4:48)
6. Augmented (4:37)
7. Neurogenesis (6:16)
Album Length: 39:19
Album Credits:
– All songs written and performed by PHAETON.
– Engineered and Mixed by Kevin Thiessen at the Cube (Kimberley, BC, Canada).
– Mastered by Jamie Sitar at Outtatown Sound (Winnipeg, MB, Canada).
– Album Artwork by Matt Semenok (Calgary, AB, Canada).
– SOCAN members.
– Music is MAPL / CanCon.Band Lineup:
– Colin Righton: Drums & Percussion
– Daniel Airth: Lead & Rhythm Guitars
– Kevin Thiessen: Lead & Rhythm Guitars, Keyboards
– Ferdy Belland: Electric Bass
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About The Album Artwork:
Colin came up with the idea of the suspended human brain, awash with eldritch bioelectricity and cybernetic implants. Our concept of “neurogenesis” ties in with all the unsettling modern talk about the singularity, where elitist jerk-futurists are persuading everyone to get jiggy with the A.I. and upload our minds into the Wankersphere.
We wanted the album imagery to be dark and moody and wrap around all four panels of the LP’s gatefold sleeve and connect back on itself, but it was a struggle to find a suitably motivated, imaginative artist to bring the concept to life – until Colin found Calgary’s Matt Semenok! His results were impressive and astounding. Matt captured a very real visual balance between the eerie creepiness of H.R. Giger and the surreal washiness of Bill Sienkiewicz. We were damn lucky to find him, and we will trust him with future visual concepts if he can stand to work with us ever again.
The artwork’s message is a warning. Technology is exploding across our world at a highly accelerated exponential rate, and human technology always outpaces human psychology, and it’s not always for the better. We’re trying to download 21st-century software into cerebral hard drives that haven’t been updated in over 50,000 years. Hilarity will not ensue.
About the album (Lyrically and Musically):
Our third album is a left-field change of pace for us, and we’re thrilled with the results. On our debut album, we established who we are and what we do as musicians and composers, and we’ll always be proud of that first statement. When we moved on to “Between Two Worlds,” we created an album with an overall heavier sound, and all the hyper-melodic neo-classical adventurousness and the bludgeoning riffola were brought into sharper focus and expanded into broader, more lengthy, more emotionally impactful songs – which we believed, then as now, was an impressive improvement on our part. With “Neurogenesis,” the songs ended up more compact and concise, but that wasn’t deliberate – they just ended up that way. Even as an all-instrumental band, our arrangements follow what might be described as verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-etc., but instead of the riffs and rhythms being frameworks for the vocal delivery of storylines, they become the frameworks for guitar melody, or keyboard melody. Which we’ve always done, but we took a sideways approach to it this time around. It’s up to the individual listener to take the titles we give our songs and let their own imaginations take them where they will as the music unfolds: jazz-fusion ears within prog-metal boundaries, so to speak. And although “Neurogenesis” isn’t a Concept Album in the strictest prog-rock definition, the individual concepts of many of the songs included here do overlap each other – we were inspired by the modern theories of the technological singularity, of how we’re only a few years away from humanity’s biological brains uniting with robotics and cybernetic implants and microchips – and whether we’ll still be human when that happens. It’s a cold warning as much as a sober observation.
Track By Track:
TETHYS RISING: This was the first song I wrote for Phaeton. I composed and arranged the main building blocks and passed them along to Kevin and Dan to see how they could filter and fine-tune the music. And the song got knocked out of the park! The power of the song’s motion reflects the sheer raw awe human astronauts will feel when we finally make it far out to the Gas Giants. I was always fascinated with Chesley Bonestell’s old-school futurist paintings of hypothetical rocket ships and orbiting space stations, and planetary scenes from around our solar system. He was painting these amazing images way back in the 1940s and 1950s, but this wasn’t garish trash whipped off for pulp-fiction magazine covers – he was a trained architect and bounced his ideas off of the scientists and engineers who formed the original core of the American space program, so a lot of his imagery still looks striking and plausible even today. One of his more famous paintings was “Saturn As Seen From Titan,” which is beautiful and ghostly at the same time. Bonestell didn’t know at the time that Titan’s atmosphere is one big opaque orange fog, so you can’t see your gloved hand in front of the helmet visor of your space suit, let alone Saturn looming in the sky, so I thought the view would be better from Tethys.
DISCONTINUUM: A discontinuum is the condition of something not being continuous, as in having gaps, or interruptions, or lacking in cohesion. It describes a system, or a process, or a structure that is broken, or segmented, or irregular, instead of being smooth and unbroken. You usually find the term when discussing mathematics, which is always a hit at the bush parties we hang out at after midnight, but the term also applies to physical objects and abstract concepts, where a complete unbroken flow is absent. And this song was written to show a method where method might not be apparent. But chalking out Venn diagrams on a blackboard doesn’t necessarily translate into gripping music, so after a while, we just let the riffs and the rhythms work it out on their own. And it worked out like all hell. Out of discontinuum comes continuum.
ISOCHRON: Even if this song is relatively shorter than most of how our songs end up, there’s a lot going on within it, and it’s certainly one of the busiest songs we’ve written in years. And of course, it never hurts to have the brilliant synthesizer tsunami-attack of Derek Sherinian on hand. There’s a feeling of whirlwind rush we’re deliberately injecting into the tune, and it ricochets back and forth between killer riffs and Middle Eastern mellowness and back to clenched-fist power and all points in between. If an isochron is an imaginary line which connects different points at which an event occurs simultaneously, then we declare that the ‘different points’ in question are the various sections of the song, and the song as a whole (the isochron itself) is a simultaneous event that we somehow stretched out to four and a half minutes, Newtonian physics be damned…which only proves that the internal clock of varying musical tempo is the only real time machine there is.
SYNESTHESIA: Synesthesia is a psychological phenomenon where stimulating one human sense involuntarily triggers an experience with a secondary sense. Certain people see colors when listening to music, or when reading words, they’ll actually feel taste on their tongues. People who experience such things are known as Syntheses, and psychologists don’t necessarily see this as a neurological disorder – the word itself is an Ancient Greek term meaning “together sensation” or “union of senses,” and to us it only means that certain people are gifted with the ability to combine and overlap their very inputs of reality and existence. We wrote this song in an attempt to encourage the listener to imagine colors and moods along with the music…which, in all truth, is what all instrumental composers strive to achieve, whether you’re an 18th-century classical composer hoping to land that sweet contract writing the wedding march for King Ludwig’s youngest daughter – or whether you’re a bunch of Kootenay misfits trying to wring sonic magic out of overdriven Schechter 7-string guitars.
ARACHNID: When you study Kevin Thiessen’s compositional approach, he has a hyper-melodic neo-classical mindset, but he also knows a Crushing Riff when he hears it. The main riff is a stomper, and as it rolls over on itself there’s these weird subtle changes to the melody, repetition after repetition, which simulates the crawling-in-your-own-skin discomfort and borderline terror some of us feel when confronted with the arachnids in our life – either the true spiders who harmlessly spin their webs, or the human spiders who seek to suck your souls dry. The song is broken up several times with the eerie djent sections, where there’s ghostly synth notes tapping away almost in the background, but that’s only designed to create a false sense of relief before the arachnid bursts back upon you.
AUGMENTED: Human progress has always been driven by the desire for humanity to rise above hand-to-mouth survival and create a better, more fulfilling life. Which is why we started with learning how to make fire to warm up and light up the caves, and 100,000 years later we’re helplessly flipping through one TikTok after another. And then the march of progress changes from humans creating standalone technological devices to humans actually augmenting their very bodies with technological devices. Some of them are benign, like artificial limbs and hearing aids and artificial hearts and the like, but now the buzztalk is all about installing microchips into our brains and connecting to a mind-hive…I know it’s going to happen, but I’ve seen too many cheesy sci-fi dystopian movies to feel all that thrilled about it. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? Brrrrr…this song was written to convey the mechanical unease and robotic inhumanity awaiting us in the near future, and how we must be on our guard. Nobody can avoid this.
NEUROGENESIS: And what happens when cybernetic implants into our cerebral cortexes actually become a mundane everyday occurrence? Do we lose our humanity? Do our dreams break down into binary code? Do we dust off our old FORTRAN codes in lieu of antidepressants? Once we reach the technological singularity and there’s no going back, will we lose our individual identities? What happens to ourselves, as a species, as cultures, as nations? Will there be laughter? Will we still love? These are real concerns. In the Brave New World of the 2020s, it’s hard to balance progressive excitement with Luddite caution, and everyone’s optimism seems to mingle with the doom. We’re all trying to feel the warmth of the sun on our faces while we’re all bracing for societal impact. This song ended up the longest of the new group of tunes, and we had all of those conflicting emotions of the Neurogenesis concept to transform into musical dynamics, and we had a lot to, er, say…so to speak. Which is funny, since instrumental bands don’t talk much. But the sounds – and the warnings – are there.
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Fun Facts – Story Angles:
1. Ferdy Belland has a record collection numbering close to 8,000 albums, which he’s been building since he was a little boy. He also collects first-edition hardcover classics, Bronze Age comics, MAD Magazines, toys from the 1970s, and assorted militaria. His house is very cluttered but utterly fascinating. Just don’t ask his poor, bewildered wife about any of that junk.
2. Ferdy Belland has an established parallel career as a respected music journalist for as long as he’s been a respected active musician, and has been published in the Georgia Straight, the Nerve Magazine, Terminal City Weekly, Absolute Underground Magazine, and numerous outlets of the Black Press chain. He’s interviewed such notables as Dweezil Zappa, Uli Jon Roth, Charlie Benante, Chuck Billy, Ian Thornley, Jeff Martin, Bert Jansch, Dave Alvin, Ian Tyson, Joey Shithead, Randy Bachman, and Greg Godovitz. Ferdy is very proud of having been told to fuck off by Terry David Mulligan.
3. Colin Righton is an excellent chef, and not only should he challenge the Red Seal, he should be operating a food truck at all the festivals, which effectively makes him the Gordon Ramsey of prog-metal, both in culinary skill and emotional temperament. And he’s into tennis the way the Pope is into Catholicism.
4. Daniel Airth’s nickname is “Danimal,” which is hilarious since he’s the quietest, gentlest, most laid-back and soft-spoken member of Phaeton. Dan is most at home at his DAW with a guitar in his hands, casually flinging out one million-dollar riff after another, minute after minute, for hours on end. And if anyone bumps into Dan in the bars after hours, please buy him an Old Fashioned.
5. Kevin Thiessen is, hands down, the best recording engineer/producer you’ll find anywhere in Southeastern British Columbia, and his talents are national-caliber talents, but it usually takes the superhuman intervention of Galactus to pry him out of his boxlike studio (aptly nicknamed “The Cube”). Kevin is also a huge die-hard fan of the “Back to the Future” trilogy, but the band has so far heroically repelled all furious pressure from Kevin to arrange Huey Lewis and the News’ “The Power of Love” into an all-instrumental prog-metal arrangement.
Front (L-R): Kevin Thiessen (Guitars, Keyboards), Ferdy Belland (Bass), Daniel Airth (Guitars)
Back: Colin Righton (Drums)
Photo Credit – Scott Courtemanche
Formed in the rugged wilderness of Kimberley, British Columbia, in 2017, Phaeton is a four-piece instrumental progressive metal band that fuses neo-classical melodicism, crunching rifferama, tornado percussion, and contrapuntal basslines, making them not only a captivating listening experience on record but a thrilling and ultra-heavy live band in the flesh. Named after the mythical proto-planet believed to have collided with primordial Earth, Phaeton channels cosmic chaos into meticulously crafted soundscapes that are as cerebral as they are crushing.
The band—Kevin Thiessen (guitars, keyboards) (ex-Azsension, ex-Datura), Daniel Airth (guitars) (ex-Chaos Logic), Ferdy Belland (bass) (ex-Bif Naked), and Colin Righton (drums) (ex-Chaos Machine) —has carved out a distinct sonic identity, drawing inspiration from titans like Dream Theater, Rush, Mastodon, and King Crimson. Their music is a wordless journey through shifting time signatures, soaring melodies, and tectonic riffage, designed to ignite the imagination and challenge the ear.
Following their acclaimed albums Phaeton (2018) and Between Two Worlds (2023), the band is set to release their highly anticipated third offering, the full-length Neurogenesis, in September 2025. This new chapter promises to push their compositional boundaries even further, delivering a cerebral and visceral experience that redefines what instrumental metal can be.
With a growing international following and a reputation for electrifying live performances, Phaeton continues to evolve—fearlessly, relentlessly, and without saying a word. The band has confidently shared stages with such notable artists as Beyond Creation, Anciients, and Bison, and is looking to open musical doorways across the nation and across the oceans.
Discography:
2018 – Phaeton (album)
2023 – Between Two Worlds (album)
2025 – Neurogenesis (album)
Shared Stage with: Beyond Creation, Anciients, Bison, Atavistia, Syryn, Kelevra, Striker, Terrifier
Festivals:
2024 – Loud As Hell Festival (Drumheller AB)
2025 – Fun Field Festival (Wardner BC)
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