Elemental follows Second Earth and The Planets as my third "concept" album, something I've enjoyed from my youth recalling such greats as Rick Wakeman's Journey To The Centre Of The Earth and Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells. 

Elemental is dedicated to the natural elements of the world being earth, wind, fire & water and much of the album was conceived and drafted in a rather idyllic setting overlooking trees and water from up on a (small) mountain. In the comfort of a house - I'm not totally crazy!

The album is a mixture of instrumental and vocal pieces, no narration this time, there's no real story to tell here aside from the reflective nature of the music. Each of the elements gets three songs with at least one vocal song in that group. Within that bracket of three the music explores various inspirations on that element.

I always like to try something out of my comfort zone, last time it was a folk song, this one has a song sung in Hindi and that was amazing to do.

As I've discovered over the journey of three albums I find I can conceive and deliver one over the course of about 6 months, which still leaves me time for other things.

Well here it is, my latest album which is inspired by the planets and our solar system. I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Overall I'm really pleased with this, over 7 months of work with more than 40 collaborators. I'd set some goals in terms of approach and content based on what I wanted to improve over Second Earth - personally I think I hit them.

I'll start, here's what I like track by track:
1.       Intro – spoken and co-authored by my friend of 35 years Ian, he's also a passionate scientist
2.       Mercury – a frantically fun track which conjured up visions of Mercury racing around the sun
3.       Venus – narrated by my daughter Hannah and a very satisfying attempt at the classical style
4.       Earth – the “Dark Side” moon song was a late addition and is really one of my favourites.
5.      Mars – Venturing right outside my style and collaborating with another friend Kieran we co-write this epic. Dodgy Russian accent by mate Vasily
6.       Jupiter – I really like the tune for Galilean moons and it’s sung by my niece Laura
7.      Saturn – This started as an attempt to write an Aussie bush instruments song but gained a somewhat gypsy flavour – great bouzouki by my mate Scott. Titan is one of my favourite songs
8.       Uranus – this one fought me every inch of the way. The goal was a Jethro Tull inspired song and I battled between the extremes of direct plagiarism and boring – nailed it! The character of Uranus in the narration was a lot of fun
9.       Neptune – I love the rock section of this and had a lot of fun with Prince Charles
10.     Pluto – planet or not a planet? Some ethereal guitar by another mate George and some gutsy blues vocals from my mate Tony
11.   Kuiper Belt – another one of my friends, Chris Quinlan contributed the amazing percussion part
12.   Planet Nine – mathematically possible and a moody, slightly enigmatic composition by long time Uni Chris Lloyd and his son – arrangement by Chris & Ian

Second Earth is a concept album in the tradition of War of the Worlds & Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The ideas and music came together over about 3 years with a large effort between January - June of 2015 to produce the final product.

The album tells the story of our environmental neglect, social division and inability to respond to the challenge combined with an eventual response. Here's the lyrics, backstory and artist credits booklet

As a non-singing keyboard player, the challenge to produce this album was met through an extensive Internet collaboration. In excess of 20 other musicians from around the world contributed vocals, drums, guitars and saxophone - all but three I never met face to face.

I wrote the script, music and lyrics and performed the keyboard parts (except for two as listed in the credits) and engineered the entire recording - I estimate about 250 hours of my time. I regarded this as something improbably large and quite frankly one of my best achievements - although I like some of my other music more, the sheer magnitude of this wins.

The album is available here to stream or download in high quality (free if you like or name your price) - I hope you enjoy it.  Browse around the Bandcamp site for my other music as well.

If you have any comments I'd love to hear them.

Ian