The following is a personal message from Graham Greene:
“Just over a year ago, I got my studio up and running again and started recording the ideas that had been building up over my enforced hiatus. By the end of the 2019-2020 holidays I had four or five tracks ready to mix, and went in to the new year thinking about a six track EP, since I wouldn’t have to do too much more work to get it finished and ready to go. The next idea came without too much trouble, and then another, and then another.
I appeared to be on a roll.
It rapidly became apparent that I would soon have enough new material for a full album, but I didn’t really spend too much time thinking about releasing anything. I had started to learn more about the finer points of orchestration and arranging, and was applying my new found skills to the music I was writing.
And I was still writing.
Sometimes an idea would creep in while I was working on something else, and I would have to trust my memory or write it down for later. It was not uncommon for me to have multiple projects on the go at once, and the arrival of a new guitar mid year didn’t really help matters when it came to the inspiration that was flooding my neural pathways. If there is such a thing as the opposite of writer’s block, I had it – the flow had become a flood, at times borderline compulsive, and I no longer cared about goals or direction – the process itself was the instant reward, and I was cocooned in creativity, sometimes to the point where the troubles of the world were just background noise. My newfound (partial) knowledge of orchestration led me to arrange some classical and baroque pieces, a process that was at once daunting and captivating, and one that gave me a whole new respect for the masters.
I found myself sitting on a body of work that had grown beyond any EP or album concept. The main reason for this was the fact that I hadn’t really started out with a concept in mind – I wasn’t writing an album, I was just writing, following whatever thought happened to catch my imagination, and going with it. I had applied things I had learned, and found new places to go, and my journeys were chronicled in the music I was writing. I had been mixing existing tracks while recording new ones, and I finally got to a stage where I had everything roughly mixed so I could see what I had accomplished, and have a think about what I was going to do with all this music I had been pouring out.
Too much data for one CD. Double album? Maybe. I had no clear ideas and still no aims for myself or the music, but whatever happened, I had put together an impressive collection of tunes, and could sit back and enjoy listening to the fruits of my labour.
Then another brace of ideas arrived.
Shit.
Another flurry of composition and recording ensued, but by this time I had a rough idea of where everything was headed. I had been working and developing in a cohesive direction, and it was time to do something with it. While I was still writing and recording, I now knew what it was all for. I would release this opus on two albums, both standing alone while being part of a larger, more complex and complete whole.
In 2019 I had come up with a concept for a concert I hoped to stage in 2020. The bin fire that was 2020 put paid to that idea, but the musical core of the thing remained. I took that kernel of inspiration and let it bloom into this, the results of my last year of intense creative expansion.
Please allow me to announce: