Mike Portnoy comments (excerpt)

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Confessions of a serial collaborator part one: Liquid Tension Experiment

Formed in 1997, this was Mike Portnoy’s first significant project away from Dream Theater. Featuring the workaholic drummer alongside the legendary Tony Levin on bass and Chapman Stick, keyboardist Jordan Rudess (not yet a member of Dream Theater at that point) and DT’s John Petrucci on guitar. The band released two eponymous albums – in ‘97 and ‘98 – before disbanding. Just under a decade later, Mike reconvened the project without Petrucci, this time under the name Liquid Trio Experiment for an album called Spontaneous Combustion. Two years on (this is where it gets confusing) he played with Levin and Petrucci as Liquid Trio Experiment 2, recording the live album When The Keyboard Breaks: Live In Chicago in the summer of 2008. There have also been several bootleg releases featuring the band’s original, four-man incarnation. If anyone can fathom what’s going here, it’s Portnoy. “Yeah, Liquid Tension Experiment was something I assembled in the mid 90s,” he says. “For me it was coming from a much different world from Transatlantic, which was a prog-based side-project, whereas Liquid Tension Experiment was more of a fusion-based side-project. The whole idea was to present instrumental music that was very technical with high precision playing and influence from Dixie Dregs and Mahavishnu and Return To Forever and that kind of thing. It ended up being so Dream Theater-related, once Jordan joined Dream Theater... but at the time it was an opportunity to work with Jordan – because he wasn’t in the band at the time – and also to work with the great Tony Levin. Once I had Jordan and Tony involved I invited John Petrucci as an afterthought. It was basically an all-instrumental, all-star group and we all had a great time doing it.”

—Dom Lawson