Into the dark...

My album Dark Corners was published via Bandcamp today.

As mentioned in my previous blog entry, the music on Dark Corners is made up of tracks that were originally written for other albums. So in my mind, before it had a title, this was a collection of ‘homeless’ songs. Tracks that didn’t fit in their parent albums, but ones that still had potential and which I felt deserved to be part of my discography.

Dark Corners comprises tracks that originated while I was working on Traces, Sentient City, Panorama and Timeshift, plus a couple of other recent demos. And I wanted it to be very much a “demos” type album, presenting the songs in a slightly more raw state. Not only to allow a slight insight in to my working process but because even in this unpolished state, I felt these tracks all had a certain something, that could easily be lost through overworking them.

But what I hadn’t expected was a common new theme emerging.

When discussing the album with my friend Richard Hayes (whose ears have been subjected to my recent music in all of its states of creation), we’d soon agreed that the music on this album had a darker, more psychological, perhaps ghostly or supernatural mood to it. This was reaffirmed in the sleevenotes Richard later wrote for the album:

“The dark places of the physical world around us may conceal the strange and the menacing.  But much more so do the immaterial and limitless depths of our own minds.”

The music shifts regularly between the contrasting moods of light and dark. Unpredictable, and a refreshing change from the science fiction aspect that drives much of my work, even if some of the music here grew out of science fiction origins.

In-keeping with the more gothic nature of some of the music, for the artwork, I decided to finally make good use of a photo shoot from a couple of years ago with photographer Dave Yeaman taken in Sheffield General Cemetery – a fascinating place dating back to the 1800s, and disused since the 1970s. This was an ideal opportunity to use this kind of imagery.

I usually like to plan out an album – come up with a concept, a title and settle on a general sound palette. Dark Corners seemed to plan itself.

Dark Corners is available now on Bandcamp.