Projects in the works

We are currently about half way to completing the first Alchymical Muse album, and are looking to release it in the first half of 2010. In the mean time, a number of the tracks we have completed so far are available to listen to on our MySpace page. The response to our work so far has been very exciting ... our song My Blazing Silhouette is being included in a film soundtrack (more details soon) and Garden of Love is feaured in vol.6 of prestigious literary magazine Trickhouse.

We also get a lot of enquiries about a series of orchestrated folk songs we've been working on, some of which have been released on the internet and have generated a bit of interest. These songs have been created by impulse and instinct rather than for any pre-conceived project, but we're often asked whether they're coming out on CD. One of them, Let No Man Steal Your Thyme, found its way onto my Seven Star Green album. Several more will no doubt end up on the Albion Mill mini-album - a limited edition seven track collection of English folk songs which I've been working on for a while. Now we're looking into the possibility of putting out an album of traditional songs with orchestral settings ... not just English ones but making use of our passion for Scottish Gaelic music as well.

Meanwhile, we have a few terrific alt-rock songs laid down for a future Luna Trick release.

Radio airplay for Seven Star Green and Prophetic Guesses

The response to our new albums out in radioland has been excellent so far.

Tim Moon has played Lyke Wake Dirge and The Cursing Song on his Folk Us show on BCB Radio and a Rebsie interview is scheduled for the show on Monday 12th October.

Chris Evans played The Bitter Withy on his brilliant show for alternative music, The Curve Ball, on WCR-FM.

Paul Baker has been featuring both albums extensively on his Soundscapes show on ARfm - playing Pavane, Molotov Spongecake, Minstrel Boy, From A Coffin and The Bitter Withy from Seven Star Green and also Lost Circus and Potter's Wheel from Prophetic Guesses.

The Epileptic Gibbon Podcast Music Show - always a most generous supporter of our music - did a special Rebsie and Luna Trick feature at the end of August 2009. It comprised a whole hour's interview with Daniel and me, plus a number of tracks from both our new albums and a couple of previews of our Alchymical Muse project. The show is available online to listen to or download any time. www.epilepticgibbon.co.uk

Seven Star Green has lift-off

Following a few unavoidable delays (why do albums always take longer to release than you think they're going to?) my second solo album hit the streets on 9th September 2009 (yes that's 09/09/09 if you want to put it that way). Just over two years in the making, it's been a long haul but I'm extremely proud of how good it looks and sounds. It is in many ways the album I always wanted to make but didn't have the means to achieve before. It's partly an increase in confidence and experience on my part but also largely down to the amazing musicians who helped me put the songs together. Dick Langford's blistering guitar work and innovative arrangements of folk songs such as Minstrel Boy and The Bitter Withy are a great asset, while my partner Daniel Staniforth plays soul-rending cello and exquisite fingerstyle guitar as well as transforming the overall sound with his mastering skills. It was Daniel who rescued my signature song Molotov Spongecake from the dustbin of disillusion. I did all the art and design work on the album myself - oh, the advantage of having been a graphic designer before I became a musician!

I'd particularly like to thank the songwriters who kindly allowed me to record my own versions of their songs. The legendary Scottish musician, composer and writer R J Stewart, who I'm lucky enough to have known since childhood, allowed me to record his extraordinary and incisively powerful The Cursing Song. I learned the song from a wobbly old 1970s tape and its magic still comes shining through. Haunting in a different way is the exquisitely beautiful From A Coffin, which is so emotionally charged that Daniel and I had a pretty hard time recording it. My grateful thanks to Miriena Jayne, also known as slumbering, for allowing us to use the song. Slumbering is not only an exceptional songwriter, she has the most gorgeous singing voice - with a kind of fragile Kate Bush quality but uniquely her own - and I highly recommend checking out her music. My thanks also to Praveen Manghani of the London-based beat poet duo Project Adorno, for allowing us to recreate his fabulous electropop celebration of the Central Line.

New Luna Trick album

The new Luna Trick album Prophetic Guesses is now available!

This is the third and the darkest of Daniel's albums and the songcraft ranges from darkwave, electronica, space-funk and ethereal to the more widely experimental.
His hybridised guitar style renders many different sonic colours which are further
enhanced by his willingness to explore diverse instrumentations.

You can get it direct from Flowforth Productions or from CD Baby and Amazon (US and UK) or right here for £9 (plus £2 postage)

 

My alchymical muse ...

There are rare occasions when you find a collaborator you really hit it off with, and that's what I found in Daniel Staniforth - who rapidly became my full-time music partner. Initially brought in to do cello and orchestration on Seven Star Green, we found ourselves so deeply attuned musically that we wanted to work together on everything. He became an equal partner on the album, making major contributions to its overall sound with his instrumentation and songwriting, and also taking on the mastering and production.

We also discovered that our voices sound extraordinarily good together ... which led us into a whole new shared project separate from, but concurrent with, our respective solo projects. Named Alchymical Muse, you can find its inaugural track, The Alchymical Muse, on the Listen page as a taster of what you can expect ... a somewhat contemplative, ambient and experimental vision with spine-tingling vocal harmonies.

Daniel has his own well-established music projects, notably the dark and enthralling alt-rock Luna Trick, and releases classical albums under his own name. A Royal Academy trained cellist, he is also a true multi-instrumentalist who is equally at home on classical guitar, ukulele, electric guitar, piano or double bass - or constructing orchestral scores from MIDI instruments. His skills as a producer, arranger and songwriter are something else again! I'm very proud to be associated with him and you can find out more about his music, writing and poetry on his record label website at www.flowforth.com.

Owl Service EP: The Bitter Night

The Owl Service has released a series of (very) limited edition vinyl EPs, on one of which I put in a guest appearance and sing the principle track (in three part harmony with myself). The EP is called The Bitter Night, a 4-track lathe-cut clear vinyl 7" complete with collectable hand-printed Hobby-Horse sleeve (see piccy). The song is A Lyke Wake Dirge and is an elegant pastoral psych-folk arrangement of a beautiful ancient corpse-watch song – also featuring the magnificently expressive fiddle-playing of Martyn Kember-Smith. We musicians get around a bit ... Martyn also appeared on Mind The Gap, and I've sung for The Owl Service before - on their debut Wake The Vaulted Echo EP of 2006.

If you missed the EP or don't have a turntable, you can listen to a companion piece right here on this site – an alternative version of the same song in a darker psychedelic mood, arranged by Dick Langford, which features on my new album.

Radio interviews (2007)

I was interviewed live on Tim Moon's Folk Us show on 10th September 2007. Folk Us is broadcast on Monday evenings on BCB Radio 106.6FM. Tim said he was "blown away" by Mind The Gap. That's nice.

I've also done a couple of interviews for internet radio, first on Prog Paul's show at Rock247Online on 29 July 2007, and then on Episode 4 of the Epileptic Gibbon Podcast Music Show which can still be listened to or downloaded.