Hometown: London.
The lineup: Tom Rogerson (piano, keyboards, vocals), Adam Betts (drums, electronics), Matt Calvert (guitar, synths, electronics).
The background: Prog is one of those genres that, like shoegazing and disco, finds itself rehabilitated so often one suspects it has never gone away. In fact, you could probably choose any moment from the last four decades and there will have been just as many exponents of fiddly, neurotically complex rock instrumentalism as there were in prog's annus mirabilis, which we would venture, not especially controversially, to have been 1972.
Three Trapped Tigers could have been born at any time between King Crimson and Battles, rendering virtually negligible the distinction between prog and math rock, between the technoid superflash of ELP and angular rhythmatronics of Foals. Formed by Tom Rogerson, a classically trained pianist who helped produce Emmy the Great's debut album and whose entry into non-classical music was apparently the Warp back catalogue, particularly Aphex Twin, the intention was for TTT to make the sort of Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) he admired, only using "real" as well as electronic instruments. Hence the band's sound, with its frantic pace and numerous time-signature shifts, its lattice of rhythms and meshing together of parts from seemingly wholly different songs. No wonder you get the general sense of them as a garage band bashing their way through the recorded works of Richard D James.
They've released two singles and three EPs as well as a debut album, Route One or Die, and you can hear the lot on Spotify, which we didn't realise until after we'd slogged through some of their selections on Ye Olde Mye Space. There, they have four of their Untitled tracks, and having negotiated the latter's antediluvian system, we played them back to back, which was a bit like having our head crushed between two speakers, with a jazz-rock fusion act coming out of one and a heavy metal band blaring out the other. Untitled 1 isn't so much math as Pythagorean rock: furiously complicated and unfathomably fast. Untitled 2 is manically percussive and poundingly frenetic, as though Yes were more influential than the "no" of punk. Untitled 3 is beserk, like techno played on guitar, bass and drums. It crashes about with lunatic abandon yet somehow it still sounds cerebral. Untitled 4, like everything TTT do, demands your full attention. This one, though, is quiet, contemplative, more in the realm of post-rock or the avant garde. 9 (many of their titles are numerals) also opens quietly, and is spacey and soft, with a spangly and shimmery backdrop, almost reminiscent of Starsailor-era Tim Buckley. There is much here to process and appreciate, and although some have suggested TTT are overly polite compared to Battles – all bloodless methodology and virtuosic excellence with little or no heat or intensity of vision – to our untrained ears this, to quote the original prog voyagers, is no disgrace.[source]
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