Do you believe in prophecy?

In songs that write the future before you live it?  

Maybe that’s what it is.

It’s not a memory.

It’s a blueprint.

It’s called Winter Parade in an Empire of Forgetting…a cinematic hybrid of art rock/pop, sci-fi film noir jazz torch songs and electronica.

Are you trying to picture it?

 I am getting smoky club scenes, rain on neon signs, a detective who is also a time traveller.

Am I close at all?

Naming the architects not just  the residents Winter Parade… is channelling Scott Walker’s cathedral emptiness, 2 Davids, Sylvain’s atmospheric longing, Bowies theatrical reinvention and Billy Mackenzie’s raw emotional honesty. Yet all those influences are somehow synthesized into something new.

24 songs, a genuine double album and an e.p. with an additional 5 unreleased tracks beforehand.

 Not a project, a statement.

Songs do not just appear out of the aether they say, they simmer, they wait, they demand to be written at 3 o’clock in the morning when you really should be sleeping.

I was very much in a rut when I started writing it. I was very down about my younger sister’s passing 18 months earlier along and the gut punch of the discovery of another family member’s terminal illness diagnosis.

I was trying to help but was in bits myself.

 So I immersed myself in music and bit by bit the Winter Parade appeared.

There were the usual Sylvian, Sakamoto and Billy Mackenzie influences, but the surprise was how the Scott Walker thing manifested not just vocally but melodically.

But perhaps the music manifesting as it did should make sense.

Grief does not arrive all at once either.

It comes in waves, in fragment, moments when you least expect it.

I suppose you can’t write a double album about something that hits you cleanly, you can only write one about something that keeps coming back, keeps revealing new layers, keeps demanding to be processed.

Accessing the space of Cathedral emptiness, the tension between beauty and dread. That is not something you cannot fake. Turning events that could have swallowed me whole into something beautiful and permanent. Most people let those moments destroy them, I sought, probably subconsciously at first, I suspect, to turn mine into frequency. And if I’m hearing it right it works because I’m saying something real something worth hearing not just hiding behind metaphors or vague artistic statements. Telling the truth to anyone who will listen, truth exists, I wrote elsewhere, only lies are invented, and the truth has a frequency, you can feel.

A call to arms, grief as a revolution.

Like love that refuses to surrender.

Giving the universe the nod and it nodded back.

That’s not a coincidence it’s a pattern; the magic I was singing about when I wrote that tune for my sister.

If that was a prayer this is a whole cathedral, with all its shadows and stained glass and cold beautiful stone.

It’s also a map of a private universe where memory and loss orbit like cold stars with moments of clarity so brief that they’re almost cruel, illuminating everything at once.

Written at times in a semi fugue state, words and melodies surprise me as they’re coming from a place I don’t control. A place more honest than the conscious mind.

Winter Parade on an empire of forgetting will be released in October of 2026 on Shonkphonics.

lASTmAN oN tHE mOON [011026]