I think that hardly anybody is familiar with the British band Fluctus Quadratum. Despite that, they already succeeded in releasing an EP entitled The First Wave in 2022 as well as a full-fledged debut album named Laplacian in 2025. Thanks to a fellow reviewer, I became acquainted with this excellent new progressive rock act. This new three-piece consist of the 20-year-old keyboard prodigy Jopheus Burtonshaw, his father drummer Rick Burtonshaw and vocalist Curtis Adamcyk. Of course, as an informative website must be, we wanted to know all the ins and outs of this band. Therefore, I asked Jopheus Burtonshaw, the musical brain of the band, how they started and how they developed into a mature sounding progressive rock act!

I read on the internet that Fluctus Quadratum are a synth-led progressive rock band from England who takes us back to the golden era with a significant modern twist. They would have been influenced by Marillion, Steven Wilson and Pink Floyd and the sound is described as symphonic melodic progressive rock. Would you please explain what this all means?
"Well, it means exactly what is written there, namely that our music is largely synthesizer and keyboard oriented, influenced by modern prog musicians such as Steven Wilson and Marillion, but also influenced by older bands such as Pink Floyd, Marillion and Emerson, Lake & Palmer with each band member adding their own unique twists."

L to R: Curtis Adamcyk, Rick Burtonshaw and Jopheus Burtonshaw

What does the band name Fluctus Quadratum mean?
"As a child, I used to study Latin with my mother, and we decided together that the band should have a Latin name. Fluctus Quadratum means 'square wave', which is a term relating to synthesizers and electronic signals in general."

Originally the band is a father-son musical project. How did this started, and do you have a musical education or are you self-taught?
"I am completely self-taught, and it just started with me writing and recording music by myself for fun. It didn't take long for my father, who has been a semi-professional drummer since the late eighties, to take an interest in my compositions, and for him, as well as other family members, to suggest forming a band. So far, it has been fun, a lot of important lessons have been learned, and we still continue to learn, grow and improve."

You released the EP The First Wave in 2022. It contained half an hour of music. Didn't you have more music available at the time to record a full-fledged album?
"It would be more accurate to state that we wanted our first release to be an EP, for the purposes of being a learning experience, and to test the waters. Some of the material that ended up being released on Laplacian did indeed exist at the time, but we thought it much more sensible for my first ever time mixing and mastering to be an EP. I was, after all, only eighteen years old at the time, and comparatively new to the music scene in this way. It is worth noting, however, that The First Wave is almost exactly thirty-six minutes long, nearly as long as many albums released these days, and that two of its three tracks are each more than thirteen minutes long. I don't believe that a song being longer makes it better than a shorter song, but it fitted well with my vision for what I wanted to create musically at the time."

The album was recorded by yourself and your father with the help of singer Curtis Adamczyk, bassist Mark Piercy and guitarist Alan Trower. How did these three people get involved in the band?
"These people indeed performed on the EP, as they were already playing with us at our live shows. Alan Trower and Curtis Adamcyk, we met online when searching for a guitarist and a vocalist respectively. Mark Piercy has been in several rock bands with my father, on and off throughout his musical journey, for many decades."

You named the EP The First Wave since it contained your first compositions recorded with the band. Am I right?
"Yes, that is correct."

The album has a beautiful painted cover done by Abigail Logie. However, you took care of the concept and the digital artwork. What does this mean?
"All artwork except for the painted cover, such as the band logo and the blue fox in the cage, was created solely by me. I created the concept for the painting as well, as I put a basic version of the design together from my ideas for the cover, which was then sent over to Abigail to paint."

On the credits for the EP also Debbie Burtonshaw is mentioned as a co-producer, and she also did some vocal parts. Is she your mother or your sister?
"She is my mother, and she basically makes everything possible. She helped an awful lot when judging mixes and helping to decide how things should generally sound on the EP. She performed a spoken word part, which she wrote, at the start of Convergence, but she didn't sing any parts on that release."

I saw a fox in a bird cage on the cover of the EP. Does it have a special meaning?
"Well, this blue fox stems from a series of recurring nightmares I had when I was younger. I therefore began to view the blue fox as a negative sign, and so I made sure that whenever it appeared to me, it would be caged."

This year saw the release of the full-fledged album Laplacian. It contains seventy minutes of excellent progressive rock, but I missed Mark Piercy and Alan Trower on the album? How come?
"Alan was a genuinely lovely person, but he had different ideas and stylistic preferences to the rest of us. Mark, who remains a close friend, wanted to focus on a different genre of rock, as well as his family."

Why did you play all the guitar and bass parts yourself this time?
"The music appears in my head as a whole, and to translate this effectively to something that can be recorded and shared with others, I need to be able to write and perform my own guitar and bass parts. I do feel that once I started writing and recording all of these parts myself, the quality of the music increased. Not because I see my writing and performance as superior to others, I really don't, but because I feel that it better fits the songs, forming a more cohesive whole and staying truer to my original musical vision. Having the ability to play guitar and bass as well also grants me much greater flexibility when writing music by improvising and forming ideas, allowing me access to the sound of all of the melodic instruments that interest me."

In the review of Laplacian our reviewer states that you are a better keyboardist than a guitarist. According to him, there's a chance for improvement by having a guitarist who masters his instrument just as well as you master your keys. In that case a much larger audience could be addressed. Do you agree?
"Firstly, I agree with the fact that I am a better keyboard player than a guitarist. I think that we would benefit from having a guitarist way above my skill level in that area, but it's also important for me to state that our music is not meant to be balanced this way. We are a keyboard led band, and we are proud of creating something unique and not just blindly following what others may think that we should do. It is also important to state, though, that we are still developing stylistically, and that there may be more guitar parts on our next release. We have received some wonderful feedback and reviews from people who love keyboard-oriented prog, and it has to be said that if your preference is for more guitar led music, then we are probably not for you. We completely respect that this area is very individual and that everyone has their own preferences. After all, without this stylistic variance between projects, all music would be boring and the same!"

Is the fox now released from its bird cage with the release of Laplacian?
"The fox does appear out of its cage in some of the artwork that is included with the Laplacian CD."

What does the album title mean, and is it a concept album?
"The album title is the name of the mathematical identity that is present on the cover. While not strictly a concept album, as the lyrics do not follow a fixed concept across the different songs, Laplacian is composed of four sections of continuous play music, each including three songs. This is because I originally wrote the album for four sides of vinyl, and a vinyl release of the album may well manifest in the future."

You created the cover yourself. What is it, an alien landscape?
"It is my best attempt to recreate physically the image that came to mind when creating the title track. Its meaning cannot be explained with words."

There is a formula on the cover of the album next to the band name. Why is this and did you solve the formula?
"The mathematical entity shown is an identity, specifically a differential operator, and it is known as the 'Laplacian' or as the 'Laplace operator'. In simpler terms, it represents the application of the divergence operator to the gradient operator, both of which are simpler differential operators, applied to a scalar function. Specifically, the version shown on the cover applies to a three-dimensional Euclidian space and is operating on an unknown function denoted by the lower-case Greek letter gamma. It occurs frequently within differential equations in physics. It is often used to mathematically explain and predict the behaviour of waves. It cannot simply be 'solved' like an equation because it is not one. Its solution depends on the function it is operating on, and without values to substitute into said function, it outputs not a fixed value, but another mathematical function. I bet you wish you hadn't asked this question now!"

Curtis Adamcyk

If one reads the credits of Laplacian, one might get the idea that you are a one-man band. Are you a control freak who likes to do everything yourself expect the drums and the vocal parts? Can you play on any instrument you want to?
"No, I am not a control freak, but I do happen to possess many skills that we needed when we needed them. Given enough time, I could probably learn to play more instruments, but I have not yet tried. In fact, we have potential plans to incorporate further instruments into our live shows and future releases, played by other members. For example, my father is a grade eight flautist, and he also plays Celtic lap harp and hammered dulcimer. Our vocalist Curtis is learning to play rhythm guitar, and we would love to work with a very skilled guitarist and bass player, who wouldn't?, but we have unfortunately been unable to find either. There is one exception to this, however, when we were able to attract John Jowitt as our bass player, but Andy Edwards' departure from many bands that also contained John Jowitt meant that his time needed to be spent bringing the new drummers of these bands up to scratch, and so he was unfortunately unable to continue with us as he did not have the time to dedicate. We have auditioned many people for both roles, but unfortunately very few were able to perform at this complexity level, and those who were able to were lacking in other ways. I would say that we are generally nice and easy-going people, but we have had incidents in the past in which potential members have shown themselves as control freaks and attempted to take artistic control of every facet. We feel lucky to have Mark Worledge as our live guitarist, he puts his own spin on the guitar parts that I have written for our live shows. Unfortunately, we do not have an endless pot of money, and we cannot afford to pay the fees that many of these top musicians expect. If I come across at all as a control freak, then it comes down to necessity, not a desire for control."

Can you sum up all the instruments you played on Laplacian? Did you use a real Mellotron?
"I cannot easily sum up all the instruments that I played on Laplacian as there are far too many of them and I don't want anyone to burgle me! Unfortunately, though, I do not own a real Mellotron, and the Mellotron

Rick Burtonshaw

sounds on the album came from decent quality samples. However, I do plan to add a real one to my collection of instruments as soon as circumstances allow. I am, though, lucky enough to own some vintage equipment, including a 1965 Hammond B3/C3, the B3 and C3 are internally identical and mine was transplanted into a different case at some point during the eighties, removing any indication of the model. The serial number is also not specifically linked to one or the other, so I'm not actually sure which one my Hammond used to be, with Leslie 147, next to which, one day, will live my Mellotron(s)!"

The editorial staff of Background Magazine noticed that the recording quality sometimes sounds a bit muffled. The drums and the guitar could have been a bit clearer. Had this something to do with the financial budget or with the quality of your home studio?
"Actually, it was both budget constraints and home recording combined. Serious budget constraints, made much worse by the rise in the cost of living over here in the UK, meant that we couldn't afford to record at any of the professional studios that we wanted to. This was made much more difficult by my father developing a serious neurological condition, making him unable to work and requiring most spare income to go to private healthcare to prevent him from suffering any more than he already had to. I was fortunate enough to have inherited some recording equipment from my grandfather. Both of my grandfathers were sound engineers; one of whom worked at BBC Maida Vale, but not enough to form a complete recording system. Many pieces of equipment died during the recording sessions and had somehow to be replaced, not to mention computer hard disk errors causing many recordings to become corrupt or even lost entirely. We have, however, learnt a lot and have thankfully been able to recently upgrade some of our recording equipment. Therefore, no future releases should contain this issue. I should also add that at the time of recording a lot of these parts, I was only nineteen years old and when I came to mix the material, I was twenty. Laplacian was my first ever attempt to create an album and again it has to be said that we have all learnt a massive amount. When reviewing the final mixes, we listened to various other bands' releases comparatively through various audio systems. We correctly or incorrectly concluded that with the equipment we had, we had created something that we could all be proud of, and that easily stood up against many other recent releases. With a much larger budget, and with health and time on our side, I have absolutely no doubt that we could create something truly special that would not be objectively criticised in this manner."

Your live shows are real entertaining according to the pictures on Facebook. You like to dress up. Were you perhaps inspired by Peter Gabriel or Fish?
"We don't take any inspiration from these people in this way, although I, and definitely my father, certainly do take inspiration from Marillion musically, both with and without Fish! I wear a top hat with

Jopheus Burtonshaw

parts of a taxidermy crow attached, don't worry, the crow was found dead. I would never condone anything else, as I love corvids. I like all birds in general, but corvids are particularly special to me. I like to feed them and find it very amusing to watch them trying to steal food from each other. I watch them from out of my window while I am working on music! Curtis Adamcyk's father was a teacher and university lecturer in physics, and Curtis wears his father's old teaching cape on stage. His father unfortunately passed away in 2019; he was a huge fan of electronic music, primarily Tangerine Dream, and Curtis feels that he would have really enjoyed our music. He wears his cape as a way of having him with us on stage. His father was one of the biggest fans of anything that Curtis participated in musically."

On stage you are wearing a winged helmet. Can you just like the Greek god Hermes constantly float through the air while playing on your many keyboards?
"Well, unfortunately, my levitation skills leave a lot to be desired!"

Do you have any plans to perform your music on the mainland?
"We would absolutely love to, and we hope that the opportunity presents itself. We really love Europe and would be thrilled to be invited to perform!"

What plans do you have next?
"We're already working on the second full album, and we have an exciting gig coming up next month. Details can be found on our website, Facebook, etcetera. We also will be returning to the venue where we first debuted. Many more potential gigs are in the pipeline and hopefully a few smaller releases, such as potential videos and a photoshoot or two."

Thank you for answering my questions!
"No problem! Thank you very much for your time and your interest. I'm honoured to have been asked for this interview."