It’s summer 2019, the summer before the pandemic and I have packed up and sold Beliefspace Studio. The ghosts of my former life still haunt me and I cannot bear to be in the studio space any more. I seldom plug in my electric guitar, the instruments sit unplayed, the FX pedals gather dust and my interest in music wanes … for a while.
Then I rediscover my love of electronics and begin building guitar pedals (there’s four of my builds in the picture of Nick below). This rekindles my interest in guitars and, before I know it, myself and Nick are waxing lyrical about pedals, music, antiquated analogue recorders and underrated bands.
It isn’t long before one of us has the idea of putting together a few songs recorded on a four track cassette … collaboration via Mail! Nick already owns a Tascam 424 MkII so I look for one, buy it … it’s broken … F*** it!
Meanwhile I fire up Pro Tools and start dabbling with Guitars/FX and suddenly I find myself writing material again. I pretty quickly finish the first version of ‘In Embers‘ and apprehensively send it to Nick, at this point I’ve never put my own vocals on a recorded song!
Somewhere along the way we name a song ‘Moths to Ashes‘, the song doesn’t make the cut but the name seems like a good fit for the band, as the ideas of transmutation are pivotal to our project.
We’ve heard many stories of musicians having a tough time with lockdown but, fortunately for us, creativity explodes. I still think of that time as being a type of enforced “Woodshedding”, it’s not long before we have a bunch of songs and so the project gains momentum. Ultimately these songs are weeded down to ten for the debut album ‘In Embers‘ (12th March 2021) and a bonus track exclusively available of the taster E.P. ‘Tides‘ (26th February 2021).
Moths to Ashes was born out of my former life, out of the ashes of a mutual friend’s suicide, out of the ashes of darkness, derision and divorce. ‘In Embers‘ contains ten guitar-driven songs about addiction, madness, the occult, isolation, longing, inhumanity, lust, anxiety, disfunction .. but ultimately, it’s about dealing with those things, finding the light (again) and embracing it.
