the album or albums will describe our religion. it is clear that there will be only 4 very long tracks, each track describing the celebrations on the 4 holidays of our religions, the solstices and equinoxes. it will start with the spring equinox followed by the summer solstice, the fall equinox and the winter solstice.

my sister Bea will guest on all albums and add diverse kinds of flute (she collects different kinds of flutes from all around the world, like her idol Didier Malherbe) and violin, and there will be lots of other guest musicians adding all kinds of unusual instruments.

this is all still very much in the planning state; we came up with the idea only yesterday. the album or albums will come with an extensive booklet describing the rituals we perform on our holidays and lots of other information about our religion, like for example the 13-months calendar we designed for our religion.

more information will follow later when the plans have become more concrete. but there definitely will be some recordings, just what exactly it will be is not quite clear yet

someone_else wrote: Tales from Topographic Continents?

the working title is "The Gaia Cycle", but this may of course still change

that would be nice but quite unlikely.

some more decisions have been made. first: it will be a quadruple album; yes, very daring!

second: it will actually be one long cyclic track (about 5 hours long). that means CD 1 will end like CD 2 begins, CD 2 will end like CD 3 begins, CD 3 will end like CD 4 begins and CD 4 will end like CD 1 begins. it will not really matter which CD you start with; the sequence of the CDs is important though. so you can actually listen 1-2-3-4, 2-3-4-1, 3-4-1-2 or 4-1-2-3. or, hopefully, 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4 ad infinitum.

there will be a recurring main theme and some minor themes. structurally the music will be quite similar to Magma's "Mëkank Destruktiw Kömmandöh" or Mike Oldfild's "Tubular Bells". this does not mean there will be any musical similarities, there will just be some vague structural similarities.

the instrumentation will gradually change; at some part strings will be predominant, at other parts flutes in the soprano register, at other flutes in the baritone and bass register, at other keyboards or percussion instruments. and there will be a lot of piano and (sometimes strange) vocals

it definitely is ambitious, and we don't think it will be finished before 2020. everything will be recorded live in the studio, as our two previous albums. this means we have to play 5 hours without interruptions. of course there will be some breaks for all musicians; five hours of continuous playing does not mean all musicians will be playing all the time.

nevertheless, it will be difficult, and there will have to be a lot of rehearsals

wow. love the ambition.

certainly will love to hear it when it's finally complete. 

best of luck! 

I'm thinking that you might want to have a small tribute to Holger ... and out of a couple of hours of material, just grab randomly a few parts and glue them together, or play them one on top of the other, and that's that ... and of course, we have to call the piece "Movies", because ... well ... I don't think your album will exactly be a "movie", but the idea for a couple of pieces from a visual perspective would be nice, at least for this old man. Not a fantasy, mind you, but a chance to live and fly, and love, and ... die in a flash of scalding light of a vision and dream.

The best for you folks ... huge undertaking ... huge!

there will be 3 breaks in the performance during which the stage will be redecorated and the members of the band will put on different body paint.

since our daughters and my sister are also members of our religion it will be a truly ritualistic performance. with the breaks the whole show will be almost 6 hours long.

my sister Bea will arrive for a 4 week holiday this weekend; we will plan the project in detail then. she made an interesting suggestion: that the lyrics should be in ancient Greek. our daughters have been learning ancient Greek in school for the last 6 years, and Friede and I decided to learn along with them because Gaia is an ancient Greek Goddess.

Bea doesn't know ancient Greek, but she speaks modern Greek (as well as several other languages, she is an interpreter for the EU) and will be learning ancient Greek for this project.

ancient Greek has a more complicated grammar, the pronunciation is somewhat different from modern Greek, and the accents on the words are very different, but in a way that make ancient Greek ideal for singing. and many words, although homonyms, have different meanings in ancient and modern Greek.

well, Bea stayed a week longer than planned. we had a lot of very interesting sessions, and the stuff we came up so far is really weird. the percussion parts we developed are extremely complicated, with lots of pauses in which we just have to count.

the vocal parts are even weirder, but I have to say that ancient Greek is a wonderful language for singing. there are a lot of glissandos in the vocal parts and also some throat singing.

count me in for a copy Jean... good to see you around btw.  How are those very bad, yet uttterly priceless daughters doing.  Hopefully you have let them out of purgatory since that stunt they pulled hahah

BaldJean wrote: well, well, well, what can I say? the work is finally done! 5 hours of weird music on 4 CDs. our most ambitious work so far will be released Jul 1st. details will follow soon

 

Great! So the official title is The Gaia Cycle?

Yes, and the band name for this project will not be Bald Angels but Mother Gaia. This is somewhat reminiscent of Hawkwind releasing the album "White Noise" under the name "Psychedelic Warriors".

Here is some more information. There are four long tracks on the album, or rather one ultra-long track. The four tracks are:

θέρος (Summer) 75:11

grand piano, Hammond B-3, harpsichord, mellotron, electric piano, harmonium, vibraphone, acoustic and electric guitar, EMS synthi A, theremin, recorder, assorted percussion, vocals, overtone singing.