"Er ..." was Peter Hammill's response when The Prague Post asked him what ever happened to progressive rock. In his case, maybe it never went away. Even though he is a veteran of the sometimes excessively baroque '60s progressive rock movement, Hammill never associated with acts that stuck daggers in their keyboards, performed wearing capes or compromised their creativity at contract signings.

Depending on which prog-rock connoisseur you talk to, Van der Graaf Generator, the band Hammill helped found in 1967, produced at least two of the genre's better works during its sporadic career. On albums like Godbluff (1975) and The Quiet Zone (1977), Hammill wielded a vocal intensity that would put many a fledgling punk rocker to shame.

"I'm damned sure Bowie copied a lot out of that geezer," Johnny Rotten said of Hammill during an interview with the BBC in 1977. Before the punks listening to the broadcast could get their hands out of their pockets to scratch their Mohawks, Rotten gushed, "I love everything [Hammill] has done."

Speculations of influence aside, most rock singers are relatively timid about going to places Hammill's voice went — and still goes. His over-the-top vocals are intentional. "From an early stage I wanted to do different stuff with the voice," Hammill says. "Perhaps over the years I've come back to more conventional aspects of control, power and discipline. But I still see it as my job to act through singing."

Leveraging what Hammill characterizes as the "openness of the [prog-rock] form at the time," he began to use his knack for composing compelling, epic-length works in the '60s. So it's no surprise that his latest studio work amounts to a postmodern rock opera/suite. There are also echoes of that approach in his 2004 release, Incoherence (on the UK's Fie! label), about which Hammill says, "There's quite a lot of reflective hollow laughter involved with Incoherence, since it is, after all, a lyrical work which bangs on about the impossibility/unworkability of language. It's also fairly episodic rather than unified, even if it's presented as one piece."

Similarly, Hammill's extensive catalog contains music and lyrics that, unlike much of rock music, are not a full-frontal insult on the audience's intelligence. Instead, he appeals to thinking listeners, sending them on a blend of symphonic and folk-tinged journeys with lyrics that do not shirk the more dark, complex and ambiguous aspects of life.

At his upcoming Archa performance, Hammill's guitar, keyboard and vocals will be accompanied by violinist Stuart Gordon. Hammill is quick to add that the word violinist "doesn't begin to describe what he does with the instrument and his effects." Gordon, who also contributes to Hammill's studio recordings, has been appearing onstage with him for the past 10 years. "It's immensely flexible — it can be really aggressive or extraordinarily gentle," Hammill says of their duo work. "In any event, the songs get taken apart and put together in a different form."