I had been working with fellow musician, Felix Jay as the duo Aqueous, producing improvised music that eventually led to the release of Tall Cloudtrees Falling – our debut. Felix had known Joachim and had contributed to his Bastionen Der Liebe release. Knowing that I was a huge fan and upon hearing that Joachim was to be in England, he organised a day’s recording session at his home resulting in the release of Meeting the Magus. Titles taking their cue from the fact that much of the work was conceived on Easter Sunday. It was a inspirational experience to play with Joachim. He was such a kind and gentle man, and put us immediately at ease with his calm, quiet manner.

The idea for re-working Meeting the Magus coalesced slowly after I had organised and played a wonderful concert with Hans-Joachim Roedelius a couple of years ago. I always felt there was beautiful work on the original album that I wanted to re-visit and thought it would be interesting to use the melodic elements from that original release, adding textures and found sounds from my own way of working. So a process began early this year which has finally led to After the Magus – to resound.

I had also received a collection of CD-Rs from Felix recently of all the work we had done together plus a number of extra tracks that he had culled from the original ‘Magus’ material.

I wanted to try and re-interpret ‘Magus’ in the style of the work that I’m producing now. I felt there were always rather lovely snippets of melody in there. There was also a chance to use modern editing and production techniques on what was essentially twenty year old material.