Sun Dance

Tracks :-

1). “Dance of a New Dawn”
2). “Ride the Wind”
3). “Swamp Fever”
4). “Sun Dance”
5). “Night of the Reptiles”
6). “Airflow”
7). “Stampede”
8). “Pagan Dance”

The previous album Temples turned out to be a very atmospheric album. So in contrast I wanted to do a nice more up-front sounding sequencer based electronic synth album with tracks that are mostly in dance tempos. I also wanted to mix synthesiser sounds from vintage to modern times to see what came out. For the rhythmical base on each track, I therefore used mostly mechanical rhythmical synthesiser sequences in almost traditional electronic music style plus some drums and percussion. The overall impression is, I hope, is light and feel-good even though blues or minor scales are often used for that bit of rock bias. There are still plenty of contrasting sections though and some more weird sounding material like the track “Swamp Fever” with it’s strange voices. I’ve also used some, hopefully, musically interesting acoustic manipulated sound samples well to add an extra dimension to the mostly central electronic sound .

Synthesisers in their more pure form form the basis of the sounds of Sun Dance. I’ve tried to feature most of the major developments in synthesis technology from the early classic vintage analogue synth sounds like the Moog, The Prophet and my own modular instrument through FM and Phase Distortion synthesis. More acoustic types of sounds come from my physical modelling and other modelling technologies right through to the latest software synthesis and sound sampling methods. For example, Swamp Fever uses a strange modern software instrument called “The Traveliser” to produce all the odd voice sounds. Night of the Reptiles makes use of a cool software instrument called “Spektral Delay” to play a recorded sample of a digeridoo and then transform this sound into the sections of evolving rhythmical swamp frog sounds .