it’s been a long time coming, this album
The idea was initially conceived back in late 2019, I think … certainly just prior to the whole covid lockdown and the ensuing madness. Brendan and I had spoken about working on something together again, but this time with just the two of us. We wanted to do something a bit different to what either of us had done previously in band formats and collaborations. Something inspired by our shared appreciation for instrumental music of all kinds.
We agreed to just start sharing demos and ideas to work on together, with no preconceived thoughts of style or musical direction.
What happened was an outpouring of new music over the following year or so that left us with a lot of choices to make and a lot of thinking to do. We created somewhere between 25 and 30 pieces of music during that time. Some were ideas that were formed by one of us and then collaborated on to completion, some were even conceived and recorded on the fly in Zoom and Teams sessions while working in our own studios at the same time and firing files back and forth across the internet. We also made some field recordings which are used to enhance the feel of the music or as a base. That was a lot of fun, despite the technical headaches at times.
One session I vividly remember was recording the dobro track in the dark, with 2 microphones set up in a close and ambient microphone configuration. I just played the part I had thought of earlier that day, just 2 takes, and kept the one with the best feel. Brendan then added his magic afterward and my field recordings to create something I think is really special.
There was also a time when Brendan lost a load of recordings to the failure of a backup and the main storage of the files, which was pretty depressing, especially for him. Eventually, some of those recordings were recreated, though some remain lost forever, sadly.
We started to go through the music we had created to find the pieces that we really thought would make an album that represented what we had tried to achieve. Music that could take you somewhere else, another place, another atmosphere, another time, another dream, and music that also reflected the world around us and what is happening to our environment. Out of those many pieces of music we chose 13 to finalise for our producer and engineer to mix.
Then some idiot had the brilliant idea of making a Nine Stones Close album … which turned into two Nine Stones Close albums, which led to all of this music being left in limbo, half mixed and now on the shelf ….. add to that the shit that happens in life .. quite a lot of it in my case over the last 3 years … and here we are, finally ready with the album.
It was a couple of months after the release of Adventures In Anhedonia, that we received the first batch of mixes from Paul van Zeeland. It was like hearing the music for the first time. I probably hadn’t listened to this music in about 4 years, by this point. The mixing process had added some astonishing detail to what we had created. It was wide open, dynamic and immersive. I was suddenly pretty excited about the album again.
Over the past few months all of the mixes were completed and we set about trying to decide what should be on the final album. We wanted it to be cohesive and to fit within the format of vinyl, so approximately 40 minutes in total. We unanimously agreed on the 10 tracks that we thought made the best album, there was little to discuss, we both picked the same set of tracks when we went away and came back with a list. Spooky or just meant to be?
The three left over tracks were still too good to leave out completely, so we decided to add them as bonus tracks at the end of the CD version, with a noticeable gap between the main album and these additional pieces. These 3 extra pieces do not appear on the vinyl due to the limitations of the format.
The artwork came at the end. I had taken many photos on my travels over the past few years, especially in Japan and Switzerland, and I started work on editing and cleaning up some of my favourite ones, and treating the photographs to achieve a style for the artwork. I had the idea of creating a photo for each track that acted as a kind of pictorial travelogue and reflected the what the music meant or felt like to me. Once I had drafted my layout, I handed this over to my friend, Antonio Seijas, to finish the layout and prepare the artwork for release. I can’t thank him enough for his help, as layout and print preparation is vital and certainly not my area of expertise!
only 100?
Yes, there will only be 100 copies of the CD pressed initially, and only these 100 will contain the 3 bonus tracks. The reason for this is the dying market for physical formats. It’s becoming impossible to fund a pressing these days with the dwindling interest. We hope that we can sell the 100 copies and break even. After that the CD will be pressed on demand at Elasticstage with the same 10 tracks as the vinyl, which is already available from there.
A lot of love and care went into creating this album, and we are immensely proud of it. We may even make a follow up …
until then …
You can order the vinyl from Elasticstage HERE
… and you can grab one of the 100 limited edition CD’s in our webshop HERE
Cheers.
/Adrian