A secret garden of lucid musical dreams

This album is a journey through a day and its events, as seen through the eyes of the girl standing in the rain. The songs are points on that journey - dots that you connect in your mind with whatever narrative, trajectory or squiggly line feels right to you. As this is a concept album with a narrative arc, the sound clips can't really do it justice but they give you a rough idea of the sound. Musically, it's extremely homogeneous by my standards and I had to resist a number of tantalising temptations, ditching several VERY experimental tracks at the last minute. In terms of style, there is no attempt to reach any qualitative merit whatsoever (which is just as well since previous experience indicates that the latter acts as a prohibitive deterrent). It's simply soundtrack music for an imaginary movie.

This is an album designed to lose yourself in, and listen to it over and over again, so it was quite important to me, quite apart from the music being sufficiently interesting, to keep your attention, that from a sound engineering perspective, its dynamic range would be as high as humanly possible. By way of a two-word synopsis: it is.

This album is born of my (selective) quest for dynamic range in audio engineering. It's special in that regard since it's the first album where I set out to create an album with extreme dynamic range before starting the recording sessions. The album is officially a DR14 album, and even more strikingly, this is my first album without any dynamic compression whatsoever. This means that every note on every instrument resonates exactly as it would naturally. What amazed me on the first listen is that the acoustic guitar melody part in Covering Cold Feet With Warm Sheets sounds so crisp that hearing it strike the few notes it does is an entirely different experience from the way it would sound in a dynamically compressed mix. So it was great fun to lean into every note knowing that the smallest subtleties in playing would come across.

The piano part was also a special experience. A good chunk of the piano parts I write, in terms of level of difficulty, is pitched well towards the upper limit of feasibility (for me), so I'm quite grateful when in a compressed mix, I can peel away a lesser layer of difficulty by not having to pay quite so much attention to the relative volume of each key stroke. On this album, however, the differences in volume of different key strokes are utterly exposed, which has the effect of (a) sorely reminding me of how rubbish my piano playing is, and (b) sounding quite pristine in those rare moments when I get the keys to balance exactly right.