As soon as Six Consequences was completed work began on the follow-up. The overarching ideas behind this particular release are those of contrast and leisure. A piece may have contrasting components or even simultaneous voices, and can take either a longer time to develop or may remain within one particular place without feeling a pressing need to move on to the next. It is not for everyone - it requires patience.
The other guiding principle in this release was to make an overt mixture between the clearly synthesised and the clearly organic; the mixture between (say) pipe organ and the synthetic voices of the Mellotron, or between a string section and a Minimoog bass. Rather than attempt to merge the sounds (as in the preceding release) there was also a conscious effort to reduce artefacts such as compression to allow sounds to be hear more naturally, something helped by the way that there are fewer instruments playing on the following pieces than on the previous CD. The orders of the day are sparse and restrained.
The four 'bookend' tracks came first, almost in the order in which they appear. The only slight exception to this is Shutter on the Scene which started life as a candidate for the previous CD but which needed more work and inspiration before it could be included. Originally, these four were meant to be released on a shorter EP but the development of Metamorphosis went far faster than was expected.
Inspirationally this release clearly owes a great deal to Philip Glass but also makes a nod in the direction of Steve Moore and DAC Crowell. Of these three, Glass clearly served as inspiration (and composer) for the central set of compositions, but Moore lent much in the way of feel (especially if you listen to 'The Way In') and Crowell for textures, especially those found on 'The Sea and the Sky'.
All tunes are presented as high bitrate MP3s which accounts for their large size. A binary WAV file to burn to CD can be found here, with supporting CUE file here. I recommend using IMGBurn to write them to disk. An Adobe PDF file for the cover artwork can be found here and suitable CD label can be found here. A Microsoft Word version of the artwork is also available here. If you wish to lay out the CD manually then all tracks are separated by one second gap aside from tracks 3 and 7 which are preceded by a two second interval to break the Metamorphosis pieces away from the others. A Winamp playlist can be found here.
Comments and criticisms are more than welcome!
Mike Dickson, Edinburgh, November 2007
