Fantastic album-- The lucky folks attending Terra Incognita will get to see how great Phideaux is live!
such a wonderful album start to finish. To my ears it is his best but I have not heard Snowtorch.
I totally don't get the Glass Hammer connection. Not at all similar.
I love Doomsday Afternoon, Number Seven, and Snowtorch, and have begun listening to some of the older stuff. I feel extremely lucky to have the opportunity to see Phideaux in Quebec. I am looking forward to the show more than any other pre-ProgDay event. Maybe there will be new Phideaux music released by May?
^ Hard to tell. From what I understand, most of the new record "Infernal" is complete, except for some overdubs. Being one of the directors on a highly successful soap opera, PX is a very busy man. This, combined with his professionalism and his perfectionism is what is holding the record back. Like you, I'm anxious to hear the new material, but I want PX to be satisfied with it as well.
Ian Beabout
Mixing and mastering engineer. See ya at ProgDay !
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.co...m/bakers-dozen
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.co...-and-holland-3
colouratura.bandcamp.com
This and Snowtorch are masterpieces imho, and I've been listening to symphonic rock for forty years. I have not heard "Seven", but I'm sure I should. The material from these two discs also sounds great on the live Rosfest ROIO.
Thanks for the love for this album. It's hard to describe and understand why this particular album resonated with folks. It was written, almost by accident, during the sessions which resulted in The Great Leap, which was a conscious effort to get "back" to the sound of Ghost Story. I was reunited with my drummer Rich Hutchins and working on totally new material, which we hadn't done since the "first" album Fiendish. AFter Fiendish, Gabe Moffat and I mixed the Ghost Story sessions which had mostly been recorded several years earlier. During the Fiendish sessions we started Chupacabras (the song) and then made that album using scraps from Ghost Story and Fiendish sessions. 313 was basically improvised in the studio and so The Great Leap was the first album we undertook as an "album". We had so much material that I decided to concentrate on the shorter rock songs first. The orchestration was layered as opposed to linear. The layers contain many elements not necessarily discerned on first listen and although the album is somewhat pedestrian on first listen, I'd hoped that the "quirk" would be found with subsequent immersion. Some folks took the time to explore, others found it substandard rock wannabe. The second half of the sessions, which produced the longer more conceptual tracks became the song cycle Doomsday Afternoon, which basically took many of the themes from Leap and moulded them into a more singular story (as opposed to the vignettes of Leap). Using "You And Me Against A World Of Pain" and the sinister characters and situations from "They Hunt You Down" and "Tannis Root" I delved into the doom and decided that this album would be linear orchestration, where the songs could stretch out and use endless variations to explore the themes. I found myself slightly short and a bit piano centric and thus wrote "Candybrain" to fill a small gap. After that, a bit more inspiration came when I decided that "Crumble" needed a simple vocal counterpoint. Since the album was intended to be the uber conceptual piece I thought it would be over the top to get an orchestra and set about getting some scores done for various pieces. That was all terribly fun (and expensive) and gave the album a bit of a sheen and scope that my work had previously not had. As was the fashion of the time, I thought it would be nice to have some additional guests contribute to the album. IN particular Martin Orford (a favourite keyboardist of mine from IQ) played a pretty cool solo and Matthew Parmenter, with whom I'd had an email friendship, took some of the tracks and created some quite important left turns that forced me to bring a bit more menace and mystery into the album. His involvement can really not be under played. As well as Rob Martino and Steve Dundon (from Manning and Molly Bloom) on flute and a killer guitar solo from a friend and fiend Joel Weinstein, the album is enhanced by the talents of many fine folks. This is also the first album where Mathew Kennedy joined me on Bass (from Discipline, another M. Parmenter connection) and Johnny Unicorn brought his uncanny musical talents to the project. All in all, this album was a one time convergence of good karma. I thank everyone involved and am grateful that people have been moved by it. The final pieces of the puzzle are the specific and elegant production of Gabe Moffat and the orchestral score provided by Paul Rudoloph. I also feel credit must be given to Molly Ruttan whose fantastical paintings illustrated the whole thing. She created an identity for the album, a strong visual which I believe matches that of any album from the great era of album artwork. Sewing the whole thing together was the fact that I, and my various friends, became a band on the back of this album. All of the wonderful people who I had played with along the journey of my life as a musician appeared on this album (and it reunited me with my keyboardist Mark Sherkus who had taken a hiatus for Leap). After the release of this album we became a "live" band and that has been a wonderful trip (literally and metaphysically). Thank you for your ears, thank you for featuring this album and thank you for the evil (by which I mean the darkness, the alternate, the damned, the unconventional which illuminated the light in contrast). After several years, I was finally able to "return" to the well of this inspiration to create Infernal, the third part of this trilogy. I don't know if you'll like it and I don't actually care because I'm enjoying the explorations. I didn't know you would like Doomsday Afternoon when I made it and I tried to keep the same purity in Infernal, so don't expect daughter of doomsday because that's not what the muse has brought. What she has given I am most grateful for and I can not wait to release it upon this wonderful world. Okay, over and out!
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