Recently multi-Grammy® Award-winning artist ANDY SUMMERS released his 14th solo album TRIBOLUMINESCENCE on CD and online/streaming services via Flickering Shadow Productions. The standard edition features nine tracks reflecting the style that SUMMERS has evocatively dubbed “New Exotic.” On August 25, the album was issued as a special colored two-disc vinyl edition (limited to just 500 copies) with an additional nine tracks (four of which are also featured on the digital version), doubling the standard edition’s track count and expanding the album’s running time to around 80 minutes. It’s available through Cargo Records and online retailers including Amazon.
SUMMERS rose to fame in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the guitarist of the legendary multi-million-selling rock band The Police, followed by a prolific solo career that continues to this day. As a guitarist, songwriter and composer, TRIBOLUMINESCENCE (released on all digital platforms in the U.S. and via Amazon, and distributed by Cargo Records in the U.K.), shows SUMMERS pushing further toward the musical edge. The nine tracks from the standard edition are further illuminated with the addition of nine more compositions on the double vinyl.
“In this searching process, there generally tends to be a few at the end that you can’t get in,” laughs SUMMERS. “Paring my favorite material from the sessions down to CD length was a challenge, and inevitably something doesn’t get included – and it always hurts! When we were ready to produce the vinyl edition, we had the CD track list that we were happy with, but it was too long to fit on a single LP, so we would need to issue it as a double album on vinyl regardless. That opened up the opportunity for us to revisit some of the compositions that had been cut, in order to fill two full discs. This gives listeners a closer look inside the process for this album, and the space I was exploring with this material. I enjoyed recording all these tracks, and so I am thrilled that they will see the light.”
The physical footprint of the vinyl also opened up another opportunity for SUMMERS – that is, to share more of his acclaimed photography as part of the album art and packaging. “Aside from the front cover and the back, with the track list, there are two 12-inch square panels on the interior. I thought this would be a chance to create a visual equivalent, even if only on the inside of the vinyl album. These are photographs I have made all over the world – Morocco, Africa, China, Southeast Asia and beyond. I think it makes this vinyl edition more of a true multimedia package, with the photography reflecting the music and vice versa.”
The vinyl edition’s first two sides follow the sequence of the standard CD edition’s first six tracks, adding a seventh track, “True Nature,” to close Side B. Side C begins with the standard edition’s “Gigantopithecus” and “Pukul Bunye Bunye,” and then adds three new tracks. Side D is all new, except for the final track, “Garden of the Sea,” which is also the final track on the standard edition. “For me, ‘Garden of the Sea’ closes the sonic journey of TRIBOLUMINESCENCE, so it was important that it be the final track on both editions,” he notes.
“‘True Nature’ is a bit of a companion piece to ‘Garden of the Sea,’ as they both came from sessions with the great Armenian cellist Artyom Manukyan. ‘Sweet Milk’ was a straight improvisation, on an instrument called a Lavta, a cousin of the Oud. I purchased it at about 11 a.m. one morning, and by about 12:30 had the track. Some of these extra tracks push all the way out – ‘Sam & Janet,’ for instance, or the reverse loop of ‘Better Than Earth.’ God Bless vinyl! It gives the work a chance at life.”
