Mark Van Hoen:
I bought the book ‘The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo’ in 1993. It was/is highly mystical and hard for me to understand in many ways…but still inspiring. I have since discovered that my great grandparents were from Calcutta (now Kolkata) as was Sri Aurobindo..so perhaps there’s some element of serendipity there. In early 1994, I temporarily moved to my parents house in Malvern, England for a few weeks whilst I got myself together financially to rent a house back in London with Neil Halstead and Daren Seymour. Daren was keen to collaborate on a new record, and visited me in Malvern. All my instruments were there ready to record, and on the morning of the day we made the album we took a walk on the nearby hills (Malvern is famous for it’s range of hills) - it was suitably atmospheric, covered in mist and fog..being around Jan/Feb I think. The album started off with a found tape that annotated a neuroscience experiment, which is the track ‘August 20, 1977’. I had found the tape in the loft of the first house I rented in London in 1988. An old friend, with whom I had made music in the 80’s was also living there, and he was and still is in the neuroscience research profession. Several of his colleagues had lived at that same house, and obviously had stored tapes there in the attic. After hearing the tape, It seemed a great idea to refer to dates and events that were significant to Daren and I musically. That’s the concept of the album. On return from our morning walk, we started to record the tracks that made up the album, which we completed that same day. The instruments we used were
Yamaha CS80 (in fact, I only owned this for a brief period, and from what I can remember it was the only record I used it on - perhaps also tracks on ’Natural Composite')
Revox B77 tape machine (all tracks were mixed down on to this 1/4” stereo tape recorder, sometime manipulated with it’s custom varispeed control)
An Apple Quadra 650 computer, running the first version of GRM tools…which was very new at the time..used most notably on ‘Mirror’)
When we’d completed the recordings, Touch (or more accurately it’s sub-label Ash International) agreed to release it. The cover artwork was based on the cover design of the book ‘The Vision and Work of Sri Aurobindo’, and was completed by Russell Haswell.