As Harry said we would announce quite some time ago, we are in fact going on hiatus as a unit.
This has been a long time coming and in no way is a retirement. We are, quite simply put, burned right out. Each of the composite bands (Enoch, Sudan, Rest In Peace, Theosophical Society) has about three albums worth of material already recorded each. That is, you guessed it, about 12 albums worth of material waiting in the wings yet to be released, many of which will be multi-disc affairs. Our extended break from touring lead to the most furious creative spurt we have ever encountered and, frankly, we are tired. But the elephant in the room!
The real thing that did a number on us was the recent Grand Society work. Between going back and giving proper production to the suite we had recorded in Mk. 1 of the group to recording the three prog operas for Mk. 2, totaling just under 9 hours of music total for those three alone, really have sucked all the musical meat from our bones. Those albums have been just consuming us for the past several months, between subtle tweaks and rerecording sections, writing new bits, rearranging, getting feedback, etc. It weighed down especially hard on us because Daniel, Chris and I were the primary songwriters for this one. All of the other guys wrote bits (Eduard and Rick saved some pieces that were foundering, trust me), but we really did the brunt of the work. This is primarily because of the origin of the project.
It came from our secret project that we started quite a while ago (OOC: Significantly before the Great Crash, in fact). We'd been working on a musical adaption of the comic series The Sandman because we had done pieces of music based on other books before and thought that it had the right kind of dramatic flair to really make the jump to prog rock in a really cool way. We had been working on it fairly consistently over the past several years with aid from Chris, but we eventually put it away out of frustration. When Eduard came in, we were chatting about it and he got very excited, despite having never read the book. He wound up bringing in some great riffs and little bits he didn't have a home for and we were able to really mend the songs well. He then suggested that we get Chris back in to take a look at them and, when he was listening, one of us brought up the idea of reforming the Grand Society. I forget who said it, but we all get very, very excited and, next thing you know, we were shipping tapes here, there and everywhere for cuts to mix in to the album and write around. It was decided that, since the project started with us, we would be the Tapemasters for it and do all the arranging and whatnot, which we were glad for because, honestly, I think Daniel and I prefer producing albums more than performing on them.
Anyway, we wound up having almost 40 minutes worth of leftover music when we were done, so we started talking about how The Sandman has a sort of sequel called Lucifer, and everyone got excited and we started shaping up material for that! That one took some time as well, but not the years that Sandman took. And when we were done, we were still buzzing, so we whipped up an adaption of the book Transmetropolitan as well. It was quite the creative period, but all of the work going into it has just left us totally burned out. So, as a result, we won't be touring or working on new material for quite a while. Eduard still will be; he came out of this actually quite level, which was fantastic to see. But Enoch, Sudan, and the Society are going to take a nice, long break.
We're still going to keep up with our releases and get singles out and everything like usual. There just won't be any tours. To make up for that, we will be releasing a wonderful boxed set of the three Grand Society Mk. 2 albums with a tremendous amount of bonus material on several Blu-Rays essentially cataloguing the entire project from its inception. There will also be a special boxed set released of the Mk. 1 material. Info on those releases will come shortly.
Peace and love, everybody.
- Langdon
