Aural Innovations, A Brief History

Jerry Kranitz

When I got internet access in 1993, I quickly found fellow travellers who shared my passion for progressive rock. I immersed myself in the Usenet group alt.music.progressive (which eventually morphed into rec.music.progressive). From there I discovered Mike Taylor's Gibraltar list, Neil Durant's It All Posts Here IQ list, and a few others.

It's hard to describe that initial thrill of communicating with people around the globe. And it wasn't just people who shared my passion for progressive rock. I was communicating directly with the musicians and bands creating the amazing music I was discovering! I felt like a kid who had been handed Willy Wonka's golden ticket. The contacts I made and music I discovered would not only prove to be life changing but would impact the trajectory of my life.

One day a coworker gave me a cassette of his band's new album and asked me if I would post some comments about it. I took this very seriously. I listened to it, wrote impressions of each track, and then molded those impressions along with information about the band into my first "review". Writing reviews became very addicting.

I loved writing them so much that around 1995 I bought an HTML For Dummies book and created my first website — Jerry's Prog Rock Reviews. This was in the days when the graphical world wide web was in embryo. The site was bare bones, just pure text, with a list of links to the reviews.

The nine printed issues.

Fast-forward to 1997. One of my passions is space rock and related psychedelia and electronic music. Hawkwind, Gong, Tangerine Dream and other of the so-called Krautrock bands, plus underground bands like Omnia Opera, Nukli and Krel. I wasn't seeing much discussion about those bands. So, I decided to start my own zine, which would be titled Aural Innovations: The Global Source For Space Rock Exploration. (It ultimately included a gamut of space/psych/prog/electronic coverage.)

I published the first issue in January 1998, and over the next two years would do a total of nine printed issues. But by issue 9, though I was having tremendous fun doing the printed zine, the cost was just no longer economically sustainable. Consequently, I purchased an Aural-Innovations.com domain, found a hosting service, and launched the online Aural Innovations in 2000, starting with all the content that had been in the printed issues. Shortly after I began my Aural Innovations Space Rock Radio shows, first in RealMedia (remember .rm sound files?) and eventually in mp3 format. These days such things are called "podcasts".

Original portal image for the Aural Innovations website. This image and the banner at the top of the page were made by Mark Reiser.

I published the web zine and radio shows continually until 2016 when priorities dictated that I put it aside. And there it sat in museum form until early 2025 when it... disappeared. But it was a great 18-year (1998 - 2016) ride while I was actively working on it. Many artists told me we were the first to write about them, and I'm certain many bands got coverage in Aural Innovations and nowhere else.

3D rendering by Jamie Nichols. Email him at .

Over the life of the zine, I was fortunate to have contributions from many outstanding, passionate writers. I have fond memories of my first (local to me) "staff" member Keith Henderson and I, conducting "editorial meetings" at the Thirsty Ear Tavern, where we would stack piles of CDs on the bar like proudly giddy prog geeks. Some amazing musicians wrote for Aural Innovations. The late Doug "Dr Synth" Walker (Alien Planetscapes) and Charles Van De Kree (Jet Jaguar) submitted articles and reviews that I consider "scholarly". Scott "Dr Space" Heller (Øresund Space Collective) and Jeff Fitzgerald were among my most tenured and prolific writers. Christian Mumford not only submitted reviews but was responsible for stunning artwork that appeared in the printed issues. And there were many more.

Big thanks to Jerry van Kooten and DPRP for providing a home to all we accomplished over 18 years!

Aural Innovations Articles On DPRP.net

Since the aural-innovations.com domain is no longer active, we thought it was absolutely necessary that these writings would be archived and be kept available to everyone. We have started to import the articles from the Aural Innovations site. All articles from 2016 have been done and are available here on DPRP.net. We'll work our way back until that first review in 1998 (even pre-dating DPRP's first album review issue).

The blog publications (2012 - 2016) have been grouped into monthly collections of all reviews. All issues (1998 - 2012) will have the same contents as the originals, except the contents might be split. The issues were a combination of album reviews and feature articles and DPRP has separate categories for these: Album Reviews and Features. So the feature articles are split into stand-alone articles under Features. All articles will have links to their counterparts.

All imported articles will be marked with a title Aural Innovations and the DPRP Search will show the name in the search results. All articles will include the original URL the article was published at in the hope search engines will realise the article has been moved. We fixed a typo here and there and adjusted title case and British English spelling for consistency but otherwise the texts are exactly as they were.

Big thanks to Jerry Kranitz for letting us do this.

Eventually all articles from Aural Innovations will be available here. As of now, the 2016 articles have been imported: a feature article with the staff's picks for the Best Of 2015, plus the last two monthly collections of blog posts.

Check them out!