I really enjoy hearing an artist who will not be bound by what is expected of them. Troy is best known as a wild rocker, playing slide and riffing wildly. But there has always been another side to him – cosmic themes, jazz and electronica, Progressive, experimentation et al – and this album sees a very different Troy Redfern. All instrumental and veering between Prog, Eastern and jazz shapes and sounds.
“I feel like ‘Astral Doorways’ is the deepest dive into my musical psyche yet,” says Troy. “I felt the freest and could really stretch out musically, letting the muse shine. With the rise of artificially generated music looming so large on the world stage, I decided now was the right time to record my most ambitious, idiosyncratic, musically interesting album to date. For anyone that really knows my catalogue, I don’t think this album will be too much of a shock as progressive rock, eastern music and avant-garde have always been a massive part of my musical DNA.”
Redfern played all the instruments, wrote all the music and even designed all the artwork, but there is no point at which it sounds self-indulgent, nothing that suggests that the artist doesn’t care to be heard. For the first time, he composed the music on piano instead of his guitar and the breadth of tones available on the piano show themselves in the music.
The space themes suggested by the ‘song’ titles could as easily be streams of consciousness. “The initial flash of conceptual inspiration for ‘Astral Doorways’ came from a meditation in The Kings Chamber of The Great Pyramid at Giza in 2022,” Troy reflects. “A glimpse of an idea that gestated over the following years, and then, the death of dear school friend/bass player and long-time bandmate shifted gears on the project, giving the project a shot of urgency.”
Musically, it draws from a wide range of possible influences from Zappa to Al Di Meola or even Pierre Moelen and his use of percussive improvisations is both exciting and exhilarating in turn.
The track ‘The Fire Stones Of Areelia’ is being released as a single today and it definitely shows the direction of the album. Mesmeric and intriguing, a perfect example of a musician finding, and succeeding in, new musical directions.
It is great to hear a real musician showing that he is more than common perceptions of him and creating an album that is worth a deep delve time and time again.
