Ed Wallis (of My Sad Captains) announces self-titled debut album for Green Rays
10 November 2022
Newsdesk
Green Rays - aka singer-songwriter Ed Wallis - shares his latest single ‘Parakeets’, out everywhere on 10 November. The single is the latest installation from Green Rays’ upcoming debut self-titled album, out Mirror Tropics on 17 February.
Following the release of the album’s debut single ‘Beginner's Mind’, sonically ‘Parakeets’ continues in the strong sense of melodic melancholy that shaped his previous band My Sad Captains, both setting the tone for the upcoming record.
Imagine if Eno, after collaborating with Harmonia and Cluster in the forest of Forst, had stopped over in Dunedin to jam with the Clean, or hung out in Hoboken with the Feelies. Drifting ambience, gentle jangle, motorik pulses and glimmering tones: all combine to create a striking mood of stretched out calm on Green Rays.
The 8 tracks which comprise Green Rays’ self-titled debut mark a new beginning for the multi-faceted artist. A culmination of seismic life events - the birth of his first son, the loss of his second, and a move from his long-term London base to find space and time in the country - the songs take in the slow skies of Lincolnshire where he grew up, the parakeets of south-east London where he made his life, and the chalk hills where he now resides.
On the record, Wallis is rejoined by former Captains colleagues from different eras of the band’s four album career: his brother Jim Wallis on drums, who also mixed the album; chief sonic architect Leon Dufficy on guitar; Steve Blackwell on bass and Henry Thomas on keys.
Bookended by two songs which unfurl over 8 or 9 minutes, each track finds its own weightless zone, before wending its way to a dreamy crescendo. Other album highlights include ‘Only One Way to Go’ which incorporates a New Order-ish bassline before finding the saddest of pop melodies, ‘Slow Time Clock’ which flickers with quiet kosmische; and ‘Run’ which melds the record’s ambient atmospheres and songwriting chops.
Speaking of the project, Wallis says, “My Sad Captains was becoming a bit of a Sugababes situation, where I was the only original member left in the band. When another drummer announced he was leaving, I decided it was time for something new. So, time for a change and my life was changing too. We’d just had our first son and the songs I was writing reflected that in different ways. Partly practical: a lot of quiet ambient tunes composed on keys with headphones on. But it also brought an open heartedness I’d never really countenanced before, playing songs on an acoustic guitar while my foot tapping kept a baby bouncer going. We’d also decided to leave London, where we’d lived for 20 years, to find more space in the country.
“Life changed even more profoundly when our second son died. I’d just handed over the finished recordings to my brother Jim to mix before it happened. And in the weeks and months after, I have to say I didn’t want anything to do with these songs.
“But after some time had passed, Jim sent me a couple of mixes he’d been working on. I listened to “Getting Back Again”, the first song you hear on the album. The love and care in his mix picked me up off the floor. He’d used our Grandma’s old cello to create a beautiful coda, without discussion but with perfect execution, intertwining with Leon’s Fripp-esque lead lines. And it really did make me believe in the whole thing again.”
The band now takes its name from a solar optical phenomenon. As the artist Tacita Dean describes: “When the sun sets into a clear crisp horizon and when there is no land in front of you for a few hundred miles … you stand a very good chance of seeing the green ray. The last ray of the dying sun to refract and bend beneath the horizon is the green ray, which is just slower than the red or the yellow ray. Sailors see them more than the rest of us and they have come to signify - for some - a harbinger of great change or fortune in their lives.”
The artwork, designed by British artist Richard T Walker and entitled “The space inside repetition (expanded) #2”, is a depiction of Mount Hood in Oregon, USA. The image was repeatedly printed and scanned multiple times, causing the image to slip away from its original form - an apt metaphor for pulling away from the past and towards embracing the future.
Tracklist: Getting Back Again Beginner’s Mind Parakeets Run In Between Slow Time Clock Only One Way To Go Hard To Find
