Alas, 2013 is nearly over! What a journey that was ey? Now comes the obligatory time to reflect.
This year has been an incredibly rewarding if challenging year for us. We have lost ourselves in the inconceivable mad world that is post – production and trying to get this album of ours finished. Delays have been made, disaster hath struck, hard drives have become soft drives…BUT…we got there! We finished, Tis finished and we are on track for release!
We have received the masters and we have listened to them through start to finish. We are truly elated with them and proud to be finally releasing it to you!
2014 not only brings us the release of our debut album ‘Phases’ but we also have 2 music videos on the way, some shows as well as other exciting prospects that we will keep under wraps for now and shall be revealed in time. We are thoroughly excited about what’s to come.
With that said, all that is left to say is THANK YOU to you, our friends, followers, supporters, likers, Eden Shadites or whatever you wish to call yourselves! Thank you for the continued patience and support, and we wish to you all the best for the New Year! Now get off social media and drink yourselves silly! (Unless you’re a minor!)
This is for people interested in buying physical copies of our upcoming EP “Hail”. We have been developing the final bits an pieces of the artwork and should be sending it off for pressing this week. This means that they will probably be available for order a fortnight after digital sales release date. Our record label deals with this so once they get to me on when it’s available I’ll let you know as soon as possible! I thoroughly recommend the physical copy as our artist Terry Cooper has done a fantastic job to give our music a strong visual element. We hope in future to press in vinyl too.
In the meantime, I’m setting my home lounge into a video recording session, photo up shortly!
A lot of people listen to music passively these days. If I wrote a questionnaire asking when people listen to music and what they are doing at the time, I would assume the majority of answers would be, “I listen to music when I work”, “I listen to music when I am on the Car/Train to work”, “At the gym”. That’s fair enough, people enjoy it that way these days, and it’s a means of convenience.
Though there are many listeners out there at the same time listen to music as an art, connecting to an album as if it were a novel or a film. That’s always been the way I’ve treated music. Personally It’s for a number of reasons but to say it straight, I love to connect in a profound way with music and it’s because of the music I listen to. Some of my favorite albums are so dense and creatively diverse it’s impossible to listen to it passively. “Grace for Drowning” by Steven Wilson being a prime and recent example. It is an immersive and emotionally driving experience both in the music writing and the way it is presented.
Consequently the music I have ended up writing is with the same intentions of taking the listener somewhere else.
When I was first recording “Hail” I took my inspiration from mainly visual scenes that I either came up with in my imagination or looked up online for artists out there who had created some very impressionistic paintings. At the same time I was of course listening to Progressive music that was accompanied by astounding images that took you on a musical journey (Roger Dean’s work for Yes, Close to the Edge, need I say more). Additionally I was listening to 20th century composers renowned for music they had written as part of the impressionistic era; French composers Ravel and Debussy are amongst my absolute favorites because of the way in which they could let your imagination fly.
“Submerged” is based on the visual elements of a civilization being underwater, right down at the bottom of the ocean. Take the legend of Atlantis, Plato’s account of an Island being swept underwater. How surreal and colossal The opening riff is what I started with. I wanted to make it as heavy as possible so I cranked up my Black Star amp and recorded the riff 8 times.
The incline in my mind when I started writing the rest of the song was that there was something quite underwater like about it. I went along with that idea and was pleased with how thing’s developed quite naturally. I soon ended up structuring the song around several key changes to create the haunting effects required. I also ended up using influence from the likes of Mike Oldfield, bringing more and more tracks into the session to create atmosphere using an array of guitar tracks, some of which were played as sequences in harmony and other guitars I put several modulator effects and filters to make them sound as if they were underwater. The pad’s also helped to create this effect. There are a lot of sounds buried in the mix and without them backing the prominent role of the drums, bass and lead guitars; the effect just wouldn’t be the same. Towards the half way point of the song, I also brought in more intense guitar passages, arpeggios, the solo and the end section all being more sped up and intense as if you are sinking deeper and deeper.
This song as well as the rest of “Hail” was incredibly fun for me to create, and I am happy to say I’m really proud with how it finally sounds, a year after I started writing it.
I hope that you enjoy “Hail” and find it as enjoyable and immersive to listen to as it was for me when I recorded it.
Ryan Elliott
Hail by Eden Shadow shall be released through WhiteKnight Records on the 28th May
Eden Shadow 