Shadowsphere

A little over a year ago, I was rude enough to impose some of my own music on this blog, and since everyone was surprisingly supportive at the time (that is to say, people who didn’t like it just ignored the post and got on with their day), I’m going to do it again. Sorry in advance.

But the story starts back in 2002, with my first album From Roots to Branches, which was what I posted about last year, as I remastered it just in time to celebrate its fifteenth anniversary. The following year (2003), I followed it up with Shadowsphere, which was either more adventurous or very dull, or most likely some combination of the two. As a taster, here’s the opening track Noise Gate:

Also in 2003, I had released one single, one sampler, and one EP, and so I collected the tracks from those, plus some special unreleased demos and other oddities, onto a companion compilation called Hidden Paths. From that, here’s the original single version of Great Nowhere:

Remastering both of these collections presented some interesting challenges – there was a lot of background noise on several of the tracks which was coming from one or two of the synthesisers that I’d used. In the process, I found a more effective way to get rid of the noise, and so re-remastered From Roots to Branches in 2018 as well – and then proceeded to release both on CD, with bonus tracks.

There was some unfinished business though – I had recorded about half of one final single, intended for release in mid-2004, but the recordings had been lost. Trying to revive the tracks led to the Reverse Engineered singles, starting with Alien Worlds:

The series was due to continue a few months later with Infinite Wisdom, but due to another computer crash, I lost the initial re-recordings, so it didn’t actually happen until a few months ago. Here’s the single version:

There are now six releases online: From Roots to Branches and its companion album Fallen Leaves, Shadowsphere and its companion album Hidden Paths, and the two Reverse Engineered singles Alien Worlds and Infinite Wisdom. All are completely free, and available from my Bandcamp page.

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