dramatis personae

production

andré marques (portugal)

fred lessing (portugal)

mark guertin (canada)

 

performers

 

- daymoon - current band formation (2011)

fred lessing (portugal) - production, sings bits here and there, plays differently shaped and operated guitars, percussion, keyboards, woodwinds and reeds, and of course angklung

andré marques (portugal) - production, main drums, smashes bottles, rips cloth, plays some keyboards

joana lessing (portugal) - regular and weird percussion on complexity, backing vocals on 'ice prospector', lights the universe with a match, holds beethoven

adriano pereira (portugal) - clarinet

paulo catroga (portugal) - piano on beyond trinity

 

- daymoon - band formation in 2004

mark guertin (canada) - production, pounded the bass

davis raborn (usa) - drums

jeff markham (usa) - lead vocals

paulo chagas (portugal) - tortured assorted reed and woodwind instruments, and plays a fanciful alien as well as assorted percussion

 

- guests - to whom we are eternally grateful

bruno evangelista (portugal) - vocals on beyond trinity, co-lead vocals on complexity

michael dorp (germany) - lead vocals on beyond nature

hugo flores (portugal) - lead vocals on expansion

helena madeira (portugal) - celtic harp

vasco patrício (portugal) - lead guitar on one

beethoven (portugal) - the deaf (but not mute) cat

 

concept

the concept behind the album is based in part on stephen baxter’s mind-blowing scientific-philosophical fiction and non-fiction (any speculation about the future, however ‘scientific’, is of course fiction; and when you think about it, so is the past – even our own). my ramblings about the various religious are in part based upon histoire générale de dieu by gerald messadié for the christian part, the wise and ridiculously well-read love of my file inês for the part about ancient egypt, and a variety of sources for the islamic part, including extensive listening to beautiful turkish religious music.

this album stands for our secret hope that all of mankind will one day Get Together, or at least get its act together. musicians from 5 countries did so to get this album together.

read the rather confusing storyline and even more confusing explanations of the various tracks.

recoding process, as explained by its author and mentor

the album started off in 1999 with a sort of caribbean beach boys tune called ice prospector, that takes place in perhaps 100 years’ time. then, over the next 4 or 5 years I composed a few other songs taking place in the future (my passion for canadian proggers klaatu, i guess). and finally i began reading stephen baxter manifold trilogy, and i knew I needed to write something about the whole history of the universe, and evolution in it, the struggle against entropy. during that same time period, i was also reading tons of science publications like scientific american, etc, so around 2003 my mind was pretty much exploding with ideas, and i began composing the entire album, with the pre-composed bits included. at the same time, i began looking for musicians on the internet to help me make the album come true, and i hit gold with a glorious ‘core’ team: jeff markham (usa, vocals), davis raborn (usa, drums), mark guertin (canada, bass guitar) and paulo chagas (portugal, woodwinds and reeds). but as always, there were lots of problems: davis’s drum recordings had sound problems, my own timing in the recordings was terrible, and jeff paid some 1000 dollars to get the album mixed by someone professional and got back only garbage. so mark guertin started mixing the whole thing in canada as he had much better studio gear than i. stupidly, at the same I got involved in other projects as well, such as portuguese prog acts mispel bellyful (album released in 2005) and miosótis, where I played bass guitar for a short time, and a few others. all of this eventually began taking up all my free time, and in the end it interfered so severely with my family life and my job that by mid-2006, i quit all live music and most of the other music projects along with it, and started reflecting on who i was, and what i really wanted and needed in my life. as you might imagine, everyone was really pissed at me when I quit fabric of space divine, as well as the live bands. after all, everyone had invested a lot of time. the album was dead, and music was dead.

 

in the course of time though, i found better ways of reconciling the different sides of my life, but i also knew that i had more immediate things to talk about than some philosophical meanderings. that's how all tomorrows came to be, and with it eventually an actual daymoon stage and studio band. and then, late last year, with all this properly digested and presented to the world at large, the drummer drummer and i decided to unearth fabric of space divine and finalise it. but unlike on all tomorrows, we only replaced what really needed replacing, such as many of the original drummer's tracks - which were redone by daymoon drummer andré - as well as some of jeff markham's vocal tracks, which were redone by bruno evangelista. also some of my original keyboards had been poorly recorded, and were redone and thoroughly improved by daymoon keyboarder paulo catroga. daymoon wiz kids adriano pereira and joana lessing added some clarinet and percussion, respectively.

 

so just as all tomorrows, everything was recorded at my studio in sintra, except for what the numerous guests recorded at their own studios or homes.

 

superfluous notes on the music, by the snooty author himself

first of all i should say that i made no attempt to create radically new music, nor to explore new paths. i simply wanted this to be music as i like it. thus, and unavoidably, you will hear a lot of undeniable influences, nor did i remotely try to follow isildurs bane's maxim of trying to reshape music all the time. except of course for the ethnic excursions, i didn't consciously copy anything, nor did i try to convey 'this or that sound', but as i listen to music constantly, and - like anyone else - have been doing so since i was a child, i let my subconscious do whatever it saw fit to convey whatever it saw fit to convey. should you find anything unexpected or new, then it is either a coincidence, the work of the musicians who recorded with me, or else a result of my lousy playing. so much for wanton or unwanted originality.

as to my musical style, i have been criticised often that it is too fragmented, not coherent. well, this is the way i want music to be. i remember listening to a queen song called flick of the wrist and being blown away by the sudden and constant changes, as if this small song contained lots of different songs. i remember setting the needle back to the beginning of the track over and over again, until i knew it by heart. fabric of space divine has many instances where tiny ideas are presented and dropped, to be developed in a different shape at a different place on the album. or not. but at least i hope to have achieved what i myself appreciate in music: that a) the listener has to go back to the beginning of the album to grasp it fully, and b) if you think a melody has not been repeated often enough, you can take advantage of modern technology and listen to it again, if you liked it that much...