Debut album from Steve Hughes, ex-drummer from Big Big Train and The Enid. After a long absence from the progressive surrounding, he returned in 2015 with an album full of light symphonic textures and ethereal arrangements, ''Tales from the Silent Ocean'', showing his talent as a composer, singer and multi-instrumentalist and receiving help from a list of fellow prog musicians, like Sean Filkins and Stuart Bell.
Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited have returned with their sixth Dionysus album, "Spooky Sound Sessions," a collection of 14 brand new songs recorded entirely at the legendary Spooky Sound Record Store in Zurich, Switzerland. The elusive duo consisting of Ernest Maeschi and Karen Simpson have once more worked their magic and created a series of instrumentals which will take you onto a journey into The Great Unknown. Guitars, organs, sitars, Indian banjos, Moogs, bongos, and sounds of obscure electronic equipment exclusively available to the Spooky Sound Lab have been woven into the unique Sound experience that is Stereophonic Space Sound Unlimited.
The works included on this disc traverse an almost 25 year span of interest in writing for large vocal forces. Some of my largest works have been for choir—such as my St. Luke Magnificat or my Shoah Requiem—but on this disc the works, apart from my Missa Brevis, are for a cappella choir. Writing for a cappella choir is a very inspiring medium coupled, as it is, with text and language and the inherent timbral interest of varied vowel and percussive consonant sounds in the voice. The works, apart from Silence from my Two Looks at Silence, are all in Latin and owe more than a little to my background as a Catholic and Catholocism's traditional sacred liturgical literature. —Douglas Knehans.