no-man

Notes

Steven Wilson writes:

These "lost" songs were recorded at No Man's Land between 1991 and 1997. Most of them with a minimum of overdubbing and remixing could easily have ended up on an album...but for whatever reason they didnąt. Sometimes they just came along at the wrong time. For example the pure pop of "Days Like These" arrived when we were committed to making the more experimental "Wild Opera" album, and the industrial breakbeat jazz of "Gothgirl Killer" was recorded while we working towards our most laid back and spiritual album "Returning Jesus". In addition to the lost songs there are three remixes here that were never issued (with the exception of a brief Japanese release for one) and two more pieces from our one-hour-to-write-record-and-mix-a-track research and development sessions.

There are still plenty of lost songs and some of them we plan to rework someday. But this is as far as we intend to go with these particular tracks, so we decided to set them free as they are, flawed but no longer ignored.


Tim Bowness writes:

As I often say in interviews, No-Man albums are either attempts to distinctively reflect the nature of what contemporary music is going on around the band at any given time, or they're geared toward expressing more timeless and personal concerns. 'Lost Songs Volume One' definitely comprises material that fits into the former category.

Mainly taken from our productive post-'Flowermouth' period of 1994-97, these songs are the sound of a band on the move. After producing an album that we felt represented a consummation of what we'd been attempting to do for the previous half decade, we were caught between the prospects of developing our existing concepts even further, or forging ahead with an entirely different approach to prevent boredom creeping in. Add to this the pressures of management and record company interference ('we want a hit and we want it now!') and you have some idea of the creatively confused mindset that was involved in writing these pieces and the attendant albums 'Wild Opera' (1996) and 'Dry Cleaning Ray' (1997). As a consequence, much of this material would fit neatly into the aggressive eclecticism of 'Wild Opera', or the curious pop experimentalism of 'Lovesighs' (1990-92).

For me, (both making and listening to) music seems to be a process of forgetting and finding oneself, of excitedly pursuing ideas for their own sake and ending up in unexpected places, or cutting to the quick of who we really are (the still centre of a changing world). For No-Man, both processes are equally valid and equally representative of their creators intentions, although personally, my preference almost always lies with the products of the latter line of enquiry ('Flowermouth', 'Speak' and 'Returning Jesus').

Same as it ever was…