A Darker Season is a record made on a tiny budget with utterly rubbish gear available to me with the exception of my guitars. The record mainly deals with themes on organised religion and my views on it as well as general betrayal by those whom you depend on or love more than they will ever love you.

Around half the tunes on this record carried over from two previous bands that I was in. The arrangements however are very different to both of those band’s interpretation of the material. The other half of the material was written whilst I was still a part of the last aforementioned band but that band never played or contributed to them in any way shape or form.

That band you see, was supposed to have left South Africa together to forge ahead on a musical career with the prospect of touring Europe on a regular basis. That plan fell through , and so when I relocated to England on my own, I resorted to doing the one thing I could creatively on my own. Make records.

Two records were made in tandem. My project, and my Father’s record. A collection of around a dozen or so tracks he’d had sat on the back burner for decades.

As far as A Darker Season was concerned it was technically quite tricky. I only had a Boss desktop recorder system with limited track availability , so I had to do a lot of track bouncing to whittle things down in a manageable way. I had to rely on programming the drums myself bar by bar. Bass tracking and guitar tracking went pretty smoothly with the only exception being time constraints. Although I had no amp and ended up relying solely on digital effects to create the tone, I still feel the result was pretty reasonable considering.

Once the thing was mixed and mastered . I say mastered , but I mean mastered using that hard disk desktop recorder . Not Sterling Sound or something like that you see. Beggars can’t be choosers of course. I met a chap who was a friend of my sister’s who had some skill with graphic design and photoshop etc. He shot some portraits and helped me design the M style Logo with the crucifix embedded in it.

The Logo itself was actually inspired by a tattoo I have. Crucifixes hold a certain place in my heart you see and its not a bright one. When you get that shit force fed down your throat for years in a situation that you neither deserved nor created it tends to inspire an equal and opposite reaction.

The record was released a couple years later although it was published in 2006 and made available on disk to the public. Distribution for digital media came later. Not that it made a difference as people don’t buy records anyway anymore. And those who do have never fucking heard of me or Masterless. Still, to those who followed what I was doing , it was received very well indeed.

I think, like the Millennium Falcon, it sort of “has it where it counts”. The mix has balls to it, and the songs I think hold up well even though I could perform them way better now I’m sure. Still when I do hear it from time to time I mostly feel satisfied with what I was able to accomplish with pretty much nothing.

As I write this blog that record is now 14 years old. That’s unreal to think about.