Looking back...

It’s been another busy year at Light Dreams HQ.

Cover Artwork

Once again, I’ve had the privilege of working with several fantastic authors, with fantastic books.

While it is always exciting and an honour to be asked to create cover artwork, it is sometimes quite a daunting task. Somebody who has spent months or even years writing their book, now have to hand it over for me to do my best to take what’s in their imagination and written on their pages, and transpose that into a marketable cover. But that’s the thrill of the challenge, and it’s what I’m here to do, after all.

Every cover project has been rewarding in a different way, whether it’s the challenge of the cover or artist/author and publisher relationship. 

With a couple of exciting projects already on the horizon, I’m certainly looking forward to what 2016 may bring.

Music

I’ve also had a very prolific year on the music side of things, having released three new albums on Bandcamp. The advantage of working independently is that I can release as much or as little as I wish. Ironically, I’d thought I may release one, maybe two albums at best this year, but when the muse strikes, you have to take advantage!

Sentient City was produced in the last quarter of 2014, and released in January 2015. I’d had in mind for some time to make an album with a “city” theme – with music inspired by working in or living in a vibrant modern city, or perhaps a glimpse of a future city, which is where the science fiction influence comes into play.

Panorama was released in July, and is my fourth release in association with the Initiative for Interstellar Studies. 2013’s Beyond theBoundary album was about space travel and exploration, so with that in mind, Panorama was about what lies at the end of that journey, and the discovery of new worlds. Whereas Sentient City came together in just a few months, Panorama took well over a year. I produced dozens of demos and ideas, shortlisting 16 tracks for the final album!

I’d only just released Panorama when I found myself working on some new music, of a different soundscape. Whereas Panorama had been a slow, building album, in contrast to that, I found myself putting together some heavier beats-driven tracks and in no time at all another album was in the works. 

I released Timeshift in November, and feel it could be my best album to date.

So with that in mind, just where my musical journey will take me from here, is anybody’s guess! But even so, I can't express enough gratitude for anybody who has supported my musical endeavours, whether it be buying an album or simply helping spread the word by sharing or retweeting.

So at least when it comes to art, music and science fiction, it's been a very rewarding year, and I've had the pleasure of meeting many great, likeminded people, whether on social media or in person at Novacon, which always feels like the culmination of everything, each year – and I'm already looking forward to the next!

The places of Traces

When describing Traces as a reflective album, one of the many elements that influenced that mood was the idea of following the traces of your own past and the places you've been.

When you live or work in the same city for a long time, you gradually see it evolve. Places come and go, new buildings shoot up to the sky, old buildings get cleaned up and ruins come crumbling down. But even with all the changes that a city undergoes, you can still always pick out traces of the past, whether it's a poster stuck in an abandoned upstairs record shop window or a bit of graffiti that always seems to have escaped erasure.

And when you start looking closely, traces of history start to emerge – the imprint of old signs, remnants of old brickwork, a rusty street sign, old factory names still adoring buildings that now house flats and cafés, and bits of architectural detail high up at the tops of the buildings which have survived wars.

Once you start observing these things, you end up constantly noticing what used to be. A childhood cinema that’s now a clothes shop. A place where you bought your favourite albums that’s now an opticians or a place you enjoyed many meals that’s now long boarded up. 

It’s inevitable that you end up picking up your own traces of the places you’ve been and the memories of the people you were with. You walk past the office of your first job; now no longer in use, and think about the 20-year-old version of yourself that used to frequent there. The music you played at the time, the faces you knew and the life you had then, which has evolved along with the city in the intervening decades. It’s not that you wish to spend your time chasing ghosts but almost by default there’s a part of our brains that enjoy these reflections, triggered by our own invisible footprints and little fragments of personal history.

Traces is out now on Bandcamp.

Following the Traces...

Today is release day - and Traces is finally out there!

I’ve said previously that when you’re composing an album, it takes on a life of it’s own. It evolves and goes off in directions you hadn’t originally anticipated. New ideas come in, old ones go out. Happy accidents happen. So it should be no surprise when I say that Traces isn’t quite the album I originally set out to make.

My original plan was to make a downbeat and minimal album; stripped of the dense layers and rhythms that had dominated my previous albums, creating something that was a lot more sparse and abstract.

But gradually the music evolved along with the ideas. 

When I produced the first version, it simply didn’t hang together well as an album. So I kept working on ideas, and over time it became more rhythmic and layered – but a very different soundscape to my previous works had started to form. I began to view it almost like a film soundtrack – it had actually become the soundtrack to some of the books I was reading over the course of the year, and in turn many of the themes of those books inspired the music, as the followed a similar theme to what I wanted to explore.

Another starting point was to make an album mostly using classic 80s and 90s synths. There’s been a lot of focus on analogue synths of the 70s and early 80s in the last few years, and while I absolutely love those vintage synths and get the appeal, a lot of the albums that had an impact on me in the late 80s and early 90s, used Korg’s digital synths – so to get my hands on some of those actual sounds was a real pleasure. This, combined with a different kind of approach to the drums and percussion, has given Traces a distinctive soundscape, perhaps with a nostalgic edge for those synth-geeks among us.

When I started the project, one particular word I had in mind for the mood of the music, was “reflective”. Despite the numerous changes the album went though, this still remained the dominant theme, but not in a depressing way – I’d prefer to think of it as thought provoking, and there is an underlying optimism that crept into many of the tracks. 

Although the finished album is very different to my original idea there still remains several short, sparse tracks. These are almost like segues or interludes, and retain the mood of my original idea.

I’ve realised that Traces is perhaps the album I’ve been working towards for many years. It’s also the most personal album I have ever made, in its own way.

Next time, I'll go into detail about some of the songs on the album and inspiration behind them.

Traces is available now via Bandcamp, as mp3 and CD & digital download bundle. The first copies of Traces on CD will come with a second disc, Traces: Abandoned, which contains 9 demos and outtakes from the making of the album.