Grace for Drowning is the second album released under Wilson’s own name, and builds on the artistic inroads he forged with 2009’s exceptionally well-received Insurgentes. A double album (‘two 40-45 minute albums in the same package’) Wilson has described it as “my biggest project to date”.

Grace for Drowning, looks set to be equally well-received. Terrorizer have described it as ‘a dense yet extremely coherent album, Grace For Drowning succeeds brilliantly… Prog album of the year, no less.’ (5/5), Classic Rock have proclaimed ‘Grace For Drowning is an album that can’t really be described but it urgently calls to be heard’ while Record Collector stated: ‘there is an overwhelming sense of awe, a majestic soundscape created by an innovative, forward-looking musician immersed in the history of music… its epic vision will always reward revisits.’

Grace for Drowning, is available on CD, vinyl, and download along with a Blu-ray edition of the album. The Blu-ray disc contains the album in 5.1 surround sound with accompanying video content. The video content, created by long-term collaborator Lasse Hoile, as well as photo galleries, hand written notes and lyrics. Watch the trailer for the Blu-ray here.

Order your copy here

For the most avid collectors there is also a deluxe edition of the album. Limited to 5000 copies worldwide, the deluxe edition features 3 CDs, the Blu-ray Disc and a 120-page book. In addition to the album on 2CDs, the third CD features out-takes and demo material. All 4 discs will be packaged in a hard back book which features 120 pages of artwork and notes.

Check out the Grace for Drowning mini-site for order links for all editions of the album including the digital edition which features two bonus tracks. Digital links are: UK itunes / US itunes / German itunes

An 8 minute edit of Raider II, the 23 minute epic that is part of the album, is now streaming on the mini-site and the Kscope soundcloud profile. A new video of Wilson in the studio recording the track has also been added to the site.

The mini-site also features Lasse’s videos for Remainder The Black Dog, Index and Track One along with a free download, tour dates, album info and artwork.
www.gracefordrowning.com

Order your copy of Grace for Drowning here

It now seems obligatory that whenever a band releases a new record they trail the release by releasing a free mp3 to fans who sign up to their mailing list.
 
These free tracks can give anxious fans a welcome glimpse of what to expect or introduce curious browsers to their sound. Sometimes though, given the work and effort that has gone into creating the album, it seems unfortunate that many people’s first experience of the album is a highly compressed audio file often listened to through tinny computer speakers.
 
Giancarlo Erra of Nosound is one artist who has raised these concerns.  Renowned for their epic soundscapes, which fuse elements of progressive, ambient and post rock, Nosound have just completed the recording of their third album, A Sense Of Loss.
 
Erra states that

‘I have always loved spending a lot of time crafting layers, sounds, details, all nuances of acoustic instruments, and when you have to mix such complex palette of sounds, you’re always concerned how many people will be able to listen that 45hz kick or that 18khz air over drum sounds… there’s a problem of dynamics, frequencies and ‘detail’ in sound and stereo projection. The new album was thought and made for a careful listening experience, in the best possible technical situation, and the 5.1 is probably the ideal mix for it.’

To address this issue Giancarlo has decided to distribute one of the tracks from the album as a free high quality DTS 5.1 surround quality download that can be burned onto a normal CD and played on almost any home theatre system or DVD player.
 
The track can be downloaded from www.thebenchmusic.com/nosound. We believe this is the first time anyone has offered a track as a legitimate free download in this form.
 

A Sense Of Loss is the follow up to the 2008 album Lightdark and is in stores from November 2nd 2009 but is already shipping from Kscope. It was preceded by the single Constant Contrast which was released on October 26th and is available from all major download stores.
 
Giancarlo describes the album as a ‘move from the classic ‘rock’ or (or rock ambient) approach used in Lightdark to a more unique sound, with influences from more contemporary alt and post rock.’
 
To create this sound the band used less synths (any that were used were almost all a strict selection of vintage synth sounds) and more real instruments including a string quartet, leading to ‘an even more emotional recording than Lightdark’.
 
Erra goes on to state, ‘The overall production and sound have moved to a more ‘natural’ overall sound, combined with some different sounds and approaches, a little far from Lightdark, but still distinctively Nosound (probably more now than before).’
 
The video for Constant Contrast, also filmed and directed by Giancarlo, is now online at www.kscopemusic.com/nosound and can be seen here: