After finishing Whirlpool I felt the need to explore my root musical avenues to gauge how things were sitting, and so I produced another album of instrumentals. There are 4 new tracks, and the other 3 are from the last couple of years which were always intended for the next AP release. One thing I have always been fascinated by is music which is great for the twilight zone between awake and sleep, and I think I achieve that pretty well in some of these tracks. Yep I'm good at sending people to sleep :) You can hear the title track 'shining' by clicking on the play button above.

The track listing:

1: Water of Life
2: Telescopic
3: Washed Up
4: Mynydd Penbre
5: Womble
6: Home
7: Kaleidoscope
8: Shining

01 - Water of Life

This track contains many of my traits for anyone who has listened to Nazca Nine or earlier AP stuff. I have only ever played the violin to get something down on the track, but whilst recording the stumble album I started to actually enjoy playing it especially after buying a proper neck rest. My style is really starting to develop towards sarangi style playing which is the sound I am always after. After working on the songs it was real pleasure to explore the indian side of things again, and this is the most authentic I've ever achieved. There is loads of space and the track is made up of Tabla, Djembe, Tibetan Singing bowl, Flute, acoustic guitar, Violin, Toms, JD-800 and Piano. I am a big fan of sparse melodies that leave your brain to create supporting structures. This is something that Simon Jeffes (Penguin Cafe) was very good at as well as David Sylvian (Gone to Earth). The more you listen the more you are rewarded, and the whole thing involves the listener. I am really pleased with the tabla, I am only a beginner but it's totally satisfying to play.

The water at the end was recorded at Ilkley about 20-25 years ago and the voice is my brother Joe playing by the waterfall. He was improvising a song with the words Water of Life, and so that seemed appropriate for the title. It is also a parallel to Shining the last track on the album, which gives some symmetry.

This type of track comes very naturally to me.

02 - Telescopic

This track has a melancholic feel that I end up with occasionally, like with Nazca Nine Personal Skies. This was actually quite a difficult track, whilst I was working on this album the HD partition that all the tracks were stored on was corrupted by a crash. It took me about 5 days to get the files back but not without casualties. This track suffered the worst, and so I had to rework it to compensate. As any musician knows this sort of problem can create a bit of a mental block, and in the end I had to stop working on it to prevent me from messing around with it perpetually. I am glad that I did as i think the mood works well and the mix is fairly mellow. My favourite bit is the last 2 mins with the piano delay, it's quite Popul Vuh sounding. I was also tempted to write words for it as it does have a song like structure, but I think it's probably stronger left as an instrumental.

03 - Washed Up

I recorded this a couple of years ago with the intention of making an Astral Pedestrian Album of improvised tunes, definately inspired by the Sonic Youth working method (I will be talking about Sonic youth on this site in the future endlessly no doubt). I recorded this into Cubase with no click track, I was trying to get back to the working method I had in 1990 with the 4 track, and I wanted it to sound loose and human. I like it's frailty and the natural syncopation. Another big thing for me at this time was to get back to guitar as I hadn't played very much for quite a few years. There's no stopping me now :)

04 - Mynydd Penbre

This has a great Krautrock style vibe, and has a very similar feel to some of the NEU World Order tracks especially Global Government and Machine II. I always try to inject warmth into my music and this is a very warm track. Again as with Water of Life there are certain tracks that just flow through me with very little effort. These are always my favourites as I think it shines through the music. The title Mynydd Penbre means Pembrey Mountain, and was at the back of the house that we lived in, it was always there outside my studio window. What would be called a hill in England is a mountain in Wales, and I really like that. From the top you had a 180 degree view of the beach, the forest, to the left was the Gower and to the right was Pembrokeshire. Up there your problems seem far away, and so this track is dedicated to mynydd penbre.

05 - Womble

I recorded this one about 18 months ago. Womble is a different sounding track to the rest of the album and is more along the lines of the Trip Hop style stuff I have done in the past. This one of the 2 tracks where I used the Electric Sitar, before I had to sell it (the other is Bronze Age). I had a friend who would look through skips and take stuff he could use, which is true wombling and it was on my mind when I recorded the track. He wasn't very impressed when he heard it though :) The tablas are samples from a kit I recorded myself with the intention of building a VSTi loop builder mainly as a learning aid. I haven't got around to that bit yet. The main loop is a loop I created to learn which I can play but not quite this fast. The intention of the mood on this track was another warm melancholic type thing, that sort of Camberwick Green feeling, which has held me in its grip throughout my life.

06 - Home

This is probably about 2 1/2 years old and is bit of a lullaby type track. Like Washed up it is ignorant of click tracks and just improvised out loosely. My sister gave me a glockenspiel around this time and this is the only chance I've had to use it as it's been at Steve's house since before we moved to Wales... One day soon I'll be carrying out a stealth mission to grab it back! The track was originally called Slightly Broken but the name has now gone to the stumble track. I felt that 'Home' was appropriate in the sense that I wrote it just before moving to Wales and now I am back up North putting it on an album. Home is also symbolic for the Camberwick Green feeling, which is like some warm stone deep inside from childhood.

07 - Kaliedoscope

This is a new track and the longest one on the album. I think this another quite typical track for my root style and is a logical extension of the Nazca Nine era. What is interesting to me is the way all of the more recent stuff such as NEU World Order and Stumble is coming into the mix as well. Steve reckons I'm close to just putting stuff out under one name, and I think that's probably the truth. The track explores repetition, one of my favourite things and it works well, at least I think so. The drums are Klaus Dinger influenced apache rhythm backed up by the tabla. The tabla also forms the main bassline. The bird song is from the same recording as earlier but it started to rain and I had the minidisc in a plastic bag, so the sound is rain on plastic. The track uses some techniques I have used a lot in the past such as having repeating themes such as the guitar and the violin. Examples of other tracks would be Nazca Nine - Anglo Saxon Riddle Songs & Gypsies in the Beach; and Subsonic HeadDub - Squelch & SevenFour. Another thing i like about this track is the complex textures in the backing, it serves as an atmosphere without sounding cluttered which can be difficult to achieve. Ros thinks it sounds like a train.

08 - Shining

A few weeks ago we went to Ilkley to let some balloons go for Joe's birthday which was a moving and rewarding day. I had started working on this track the night before and finished it off on that night. Whilst we were there I recorded some of the ambience and captured the children playing were Joe used to play. The whole thing seemed very destined to me, and is often the case when writing music it feels like you are just the instrument and have little to do with the end result. This felt more like that than ever before. On top of that the starting out point for the track was the violin track from Still Shining. Style wise this track is probably closer to some of the Subsonic HeadDub tracks than anything else, it is total PSY. I particularly like the end bit which I suppose is a bit Orbish, I like the mood and it will always be a special track for me.