10. Tears in Moonlight
11. Belong
12. Starlight
13. Sci Fi Sinatra
14. I Luv Giorgio
15. Sky of Blue
16. This Kiss
17. Requiem
18. Sand

1. Memorial Park
2. Blue Dancers
3. Ride Into the Sun
4. Loveless
5 Summer Into Autumn
6. Lament
7. Urbanisme
8. Dreamer
9. Mockingbird

'I want more drama and I want it NOW!'. Right from the start Alliance was going to be bigger and bolder than its predecessor, or at least in my mind it was...

Memorial Park was the epitomy of this new approach. The song breathes more and builds to a huge chorus, the guitar is minimal, the sequencer throbbing, the vocals haunting. The room, park and girl are all real.

Blue Dancers is about the painter Edgar Degas and the dancers with which he had such an apparent fascination. I like the incongruous mix of euro-electronica and repressed French impressionist painter. This song was our first produced entirely with hardware synthesizers (drums excepted - they are drumtrax samples). For those of you that like this kind of stuff that's an SH101 on the bass, Juno106 on chords, Matrix1000 on eerie synthy bits, DW8000 on riff, Microkorg on repeating pattern and Poly 800Mk2 doubling the main riff

Loveless is one of our most shameless dance tunes with the Matrix1000 providing a wonderful bass line, the harbour in the song is St Ives. Tears in Moonlight was another attempt to stretch ourselves more. My favourite synth (JP8000) provides most of the parts over one of Rich B's brilliant drum loops.

Sci-Fi Sinatra was inspired in an oblique way by the stories of Philip K Dick, imagine a future where a jukebox would let you not only select any song from history but would let you choose the singer you'd want to sing it.... This was a lot of fun to record, Jon C was on top form and Rich B was seduced into getting his (battered) trumpet out, and I managed to make hundreds of pounds worth of drum emulation software sound like the built in drum machine of a Bontempi organ... result!!

Starlight is one of my favourite arramgements on the album and features the only appearance of my ill-fated Juno 6, I love the bassline on this one and again, it's full of drama.

I'd always recorded lots of instrumentals but never really taken them any further, however Urbanisme and Sand both seemed to suit the album perfectly and helped to expand the scope of the album, making it more 'epic'. Urbanisme stars the DX100 on bass duties and MS2000B on shimmering chords, if you're interested, Le Corbusier's vision for the future was the inspiration for this piece.

Mockingbird and Lament were two of the last tracks completed. Lament encapsulates everything I wanted to achieve with this album, the programming, the lyrics, the melody... more drama.... This song features many layers of Juno106 and some nice lead sounds from our Prophecy.

Alliance. Was it bigger? More dramatic? More ambitious?? Yes.... Yes....

Alliance - 2009

Contact - mail@thesemantics.co.uk

My Space - www.myspace.com/thesemanticsuk

1. A Pair of Blue Eyes
2. Electric
3. Faith, Hope and Love
4. Lace
5. No One's Fool
6. All You'll Have Is...
7. Waiting to Happen

Electronica - 2008

8. Preaching Blues
9. Hallowed Ground
10. Brutal
11. Leaving
12. No Good To Me
13. Honey
14. Costal Town

How do you combine heart and electronics?' The opening track 'A Pair of Blue Eyes' was the last song recorded for this album and for me, summed up the journey we'd been on during the (long) recording process. A track that was sinewy and sensual, pleading yet confident, with some dark 60s spy film strings, and a mean sequencer line. The Microkorg provides the wonderfully thick bass that carries the verses along and my venerable DW8000 plays the twisted hook. A track we couldn't or wouldn't have pulled off at the start of our journey, but now one of my favourite tracks.

I wrote Electric as a tribute to those artists who had been inspiring and moving me for most of my life; from the experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (couldn't fit in Peter Howell or Paddy Kingsland sadly...) to the disco anthems of Giorgio Moroder. Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre also get a mention, I think I was listening to a loop tape of Blade Runner and Magnetic Fields around that time...

Preaching Blues was one of our hardest sounding tunes with the Micron supplying the harsh lead line and once again the tiny Microkorg providing the huge bass. The song is about how the Church has always used God as an excuse for persecuting those whose views didn't exactly fit with their own. I'm always a little wary of dealing with big issues in songs, and am also wary about expressing an opinion through a song. My chosen examples were Galileo, Tyndale (who completed the first extensive translation of the Bible into English and was burnt at the stake by the Church for his troubles...) and Charles Darwin. I think that Jon C sang this one really well and played the part of the wizened preacher to perfection!!

Honey started life on my computer as 'Slinky 12/8' but soon took on a life of its own. I love the Absynth guitar fx in the background and finally got to use a (sampled) Mellotron (... Novatron actually) to live out my surpressed Prog fantasies.

My favourite track on the album is Hallowed Ground which in a wonderfully cyclical way was the first track recorded. I am very proud of this song, it tells a true story with a few embellishments for art's sake. On a nerdy note this was the first time we used the MinimoogV and ImpOSCar. Really an album with two faces, the one is harder and more direct with songs like Faith, Hope & Love, Brutal, Honey, Preaching Blues and Lace, the other more romantic, represented by No-One's Fool, Hallowed Ground, Leaving and Coastal Town (could be any coastal town but was written about an experience in Criccieth...).

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