A couple of years before I started work on the material that would become the first kvrv album, 'Nyhilia', I demoed a prodigious amount of material. I knew that, whatever musical projects I got involved with, I'd need to spend probably an equivalent amount of time promoting the end results and I didn't want to be in a position where I was ever stuck for options going forward. I always knew that the prime outlet for my music would be Bandcamp and that, whatever other fripperies we might dress it up in, the prime focus of Bandcamp fans is always the music too. So that period not only laid the essential groundwork for much of the material that the band would go on to release, but I think it also allowed me to hone myself as a writer.

For better or worse, shortly after we started work on 'Nyhilia', I turned on my laptop and connected the backup drive I'd moved all my demo projects on to only for a shiny blank space to show up in front of me where I had expected to see the contents of the expansion port. Hours of fiddling and frantic calls to more tech savvy friends proved fruitless. I had to face it; I'd lost the best part of two years work. Fortunately it didn't affect the band material and I was soon fully immersed in that work and, in some ways, the catastrophe had a galvanizing and positive editorial effect in that if I needed material for the band to work on, I either had to write or, if it was part of my 'war chest' of material, it had to be strong enough to come to mind when bidden. Fortunately, I was on a real hot streak of writing from the moment we first started rehearsing as a band. But the sheer speed of our work routine meant I did occasionally need to plunder the memory banks to give the guys something new to sink their teeth into.

Around the time we finished 'Swank n Strvt' (the *third* album we completed in a little over a calendar year!) I began to sense that I'd pretty much explored everything I wanted to in the heavy/glam/metal rock genres. I started sifting through some of the wav and mp3 files of mixdowns I'd fortuitously kept in my iTunes library on the laptop. My heart flipped when there before me was a folder called 'Skyhorse master wavs'. Amid the welter of kvrv sessions I'd forgotten how advanced this project, and indeed how strong the material, had been. So I walked around with a head full of 'Skyhorse' while I pondered the next steps and pretty soon decided it was worthy of a full release. I played it to the guys in the band, not sure if they would be keen on such a radical departure from the style we'd established. They loved the album! But they didn't feel they could add anything to it to make it better, which was lovely and generous of them to conclude. I felt a bit uneasy about releasing something so outre in the midst of our efforts to reach an audience as a band, but the guys were fully supportive and insisted that we take a short, well earned break during which I could promote 'Skyhorse' while they readied themselves for one last assault on the hit parade ;)

So that's the genesis of the original album. This release is an attempt to apply what I've learned in the time since I wrote these songs in order to make it sound as good as if I'd set about recording the material today. The increasing prevalence of Dolby Atmos and the current fetish for super-dooper-deluxe-edition boxed sets and so on made me wonder if there might be a way to revisit the 'Skyhorse' material without it being a mere retread. I hope you'll agree that Douglas and I have avoided that particular pratfall. The initial problem we had was that the only extant versions of these songs were 2 track 16 bit stereo wav files - CD quality and mixed and mastered to releaseable standard, but not much help when contemplating a 7.1< Atmos mix. So I'd need to find a way to give Doug more information to use in his immersive mixes without altering the integrity of the original presentation too much. It was a tricky balance, but I hope we've arrived at something that both honours yet improves on the original.

The first step in that process was finding the correct tempo of the tracks so that I could insert them in new projects in my Reaper software and be able to cut and move any new tracks around the grid in the knowledge that everything would be in sync. This proved easier on some tracks than others! But with a bit of trial and error, and occasionally the need to judge the placement of a track on the grid by eye(!?!) I managed to get reliable time signatures that would work with drum loops if need be.

Next came the discovery that I could create a slightly more useful version of the original stereo mix using three mono tracks - a summation of the information common to both left and right channels and two individual tracks for the material panned to the right and left in the mix. This would give Doug slightly more control of the balance of the old and new elements and the ability to use different eq settings on the central and extreme panned instruments to highlight different elements than those that were 'baked in' to the original mix. So lovely elements like a guitar line in 'A stripper' that I'd forgotten even playing started to come to light and we could emphasise these enough using our 3-track stereo model without me needing to painstakingly attempt to recreate the original guitar sound and performance.

But that only got us one extra track of information and barely improved on the two-track stereo in terms of an Atmos mix. I would need to carefully double up certain parts in order to create the platform for a viable surround mix. I decided to focus on synth parts initially, as I could create the kind of atmospheric information that would work well in terms of creating a sense of space and the resulting sounds would be less obtrusive and disruptive of the original soundscape. These proved to be the easiest fix and could be doubled up so as to maximise their effect on the sense of space without making the overall sound too radically different. 'Driving through fog' and 'earthmum23' are good examples of this approach. String parts worked in a similar way, on 'Colosseum' augmenting the string and synth pads I'd originally recorded, or as with 'Dance like 1976' adding one that arguably should have been on the original, but wasn't!

Trickier to marry up were drum parts. I wanted to avoid just feeding in pre-prepared loops as in a dance remix project and in the rare instances where we did this, they tend to be more subtle aspects of the rhythm parts like hi-hats or contrapuntal snare parts such as that which now augments the shuffle beat on 'Heroes of the cold war'. These function in much the same way as the synth and string enhancements, spreading the mix without changing the overall sound too much. Elsewhere, I had to try to match the information in the original waveform with the new midi part by eye - most time consumingly on 'A doll on the nose'. I could just about see the original hip-hop loop beats hidden among the waveform and, where I couldn't, it was pretty much hit and hope!

As so often, the real hero of this particular cold war is my friend and colleague Douglas Chay who miraculously took these sometimes ragged and mismatched new elements and blended them into something that sounds quite extraordinarily fresh even to these ears which, bear in mind, have had to go through the endless listening required to bring these songs to you in relatable form no less than *three* times now! I'm not lying when I tell you that there were tears in my eyes when I listened to the first few tracks Doug had worked his magic on. I think the songs deserved the extra attention we lavished on them and I'm happy, but a little sad as always, to usher these songs once more into the public realm, hopefully this time in about as resplendent a set of glad rags as they will ever wear.

I really hope you enjoy revisiting these songs as much as we have.

Luv く