Green Rays - aka singer-songwriter Ed Wallis - announces his brand new musical project with the debut single ‘Beginner's Mind’, out everywhere on 13 October.
Rooted in the strong sense of melodic melancholy that shaped his previous band My Sad Captains, sonically, Green Rays could be likened to: if Eno collaborated with Harmonia and Cluster in the forest of Forst, then 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 Wallis’ new music.
Debut single ‘Beginner's Mind’ is an apt introduction into this new soundworld. Speaking of the track, Wallis says, “the term “beginner’s mind” is about approaching something in a state of openness, as a beginner. I suppose I took something about that from where I am in both my musical life and personal life. Very much a clean slate situation.
This first part of the song felt very open and warm to me, so the lyrics take that as their launch pad - sunrise, the big skies of Lincolnshire where I grew up. It’s very much all about finding a mood and staying there, both lyrically and musically.”
On this new music, Wallis was 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. They make up a storied crew who have played with the likes of Still Corners, Modern Nature, Psychic Markers, Banjo or Freakout and Hush Arbours.
The friendship and encouragement of trusted collaborators were crucial to shaping these songs during a time of flux for Wallis: “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.”
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.”
