FROM BANDCAMP:
In 2009 I released an album of sketches focused on childhood dreams and nightmares called ‘Wolfskin’. It was the first album for the superb Hibernate label, and one which I was (and am) very proud of. However, there was always a much larger vision at play, and one which I felt I was incapable of expressing back then. It has taken some four years to develop the complete musical representation of these dreams from these initial sketches, and whilst I never intended it to be a collaborative work, that is exactly what it became.

Enlisting the help of Aaron Martin to evolve the more organic edge of the album pushed things in a direction in which I was finally content. Without Aaron’s vision this album would not have been made.The process was to put the tracks from their original four track cassette recordings over to reel to splice into a whole. After Aaron’s wonderful cello recordings, we brought them in to the newly developed pieces to create something very different and yet firmly connected, moving on from the original album.

‘Wolven’ starts exactly where ‘Wolfskin’ left us, with ‘The Dance’. The record continues on its original journey through a savage dream world, witnessed by a boy in wolf’s skin. The twists and turns of this journey have been beautifully re-interpreted by friends Dag Rosenqvist, Spheruleus, Pillowdiver, y0t0, and Hakobune.

The second half of the journey if you will, has been completely re-interpreted by bvdub (Brock Van Wey). Brock is the other side of the coin in this as he celebrates the innocence, wonderment and beauty of childhood imagination, no matter how dark those places can be as we are forced to look upon them with weary, ‘grown-up’ eyes. As a personal and musical influence on me, Brock has long spoken of his love for the original album, and the desire to continue the journey. Brock is also the only person who I knew I could talk about the real origins of the sketches with, and why it was so important to develop a complete image of them. There aren’t many people I would share my childhood dreams with, and knowing the vision of this was safe in his hands.

Finally, after four years, we have brought this vision all together and I am so proud to be able to present an album on Hibernate again, as well as working on this with my own Koen Music (KOMU) label. This comes as a double disc, 6 panel card digipack, with photography by Eirik Holmøyvik, design by Ian Hazeldine, and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri.

Thank you x Ian

The photograph in the album cover was made by Eirik Holmøyvik. He has some amazing designs in his webpage:

http://www.luguber.net/index.html