Finishing the new album

Having begun with very rough musical sketches at the end of 2009, it’s quite hard to get my head around the idea that my new album is actually finished and just about ready to master after all this time. There have been several large gaps of many months in the process, here’s a couple of previous brief blogs from 2013 and 2010.

Since the first self-funded album (Burnessence) back in 1983, one of the reasons that I have not always been happy with finished material is the lack of time (and money) spent to get the production up to a reasonably high standard. The best results have been achieved when we’ve set the bar a bit higher, as on Finding New Ways To Love (2004). In more ways than one, the new album is a follow-up to that, even though I also released Vision On in 2007. Including the Burnessence LPs and the Infinite Ocean mini-album (1997), this will be my seventh album release altogether.

Co-producer and engineer Julian Tardo has been as supportive as ever at Church Road in Hove. Julian has had extensive experience with a wide range of successful contemporary acts, including work on sessions with The Antlers and The War On Drugs, amongst countless others. It’s a mystery as to how he has been able to put up with so much of my artistic madness for so long – top bloke! Based on his experience with my album, he has written a blog on Long Term Project Management, discussing such matters as how we began in Logic 8 and finished in Logic X. Between us, we’ve just about held things together.

View from the studio computer, on a good day

The album will probably go up on Bandcamp first, with perhaps something on Soundcloud as a taster. If there is sufficient interest, there will be a CD release to follow. What’s it like? Well… it’s very me. There’s some progrock, there’s some seventies, eighties and nineties influences from different genres. Having ditched the original title of Spirit Level after it popped up in the career of Brian Pern (the BBC3 parody of Peter Gabriel) I am currently going for…

Whose Dream Are You Living?