Intuitive Music

July 2006 marks the 30th anniversary of Jon Anderson’s masterwork “Olias of Sunhillow”, the first solo album from Yes‘ singer, which has been considered one of the most innovative albums from the 70’s for creating a unique fusion of electronic music, ethnic music, classical music,progressive music, and folk. The album, which was only available on CD in Japan, has been recently re-issued on CD along with the rest of Jon Anderson’s early discography.

In 1975, Yes took a one year break to rest from intensive touring and each member of the band got embarked in the production of a solo album for Atlantic Records. Jon Anderson locked himself into his personal home garage studio in High Wycombe surrounded by synthesizers, drums, Irish harp, guitars and a collection of percussion instruments from different countries that he had been collected during his touring with Yes. In the album, Anderson played more than 20 instruments and wrote, arranged and played all of the music himself. Engineer Mike Dunne was Jon Anderson’s solely companion during the work, who had to record and overdub hundreds of vocal parts on a 8-track mixer. The album, which suffered a 2 month delay to be released, was number 8 in the charts.

The conceptual album was based on a sci-fi story written by Jon Anderson, which was originally inspired by the artwork that Roger Dean had done for previous Yes albums, and which featured the destruction a planet and a spaceship that leads the pieces of a planet to a new home where life starts again. “Olias of Sunhillow” is the story of three travellers who give life to a spaceship and put together the four tribes for an exile to a safe planet.

“Olias of Sunhillow” was released on July 1976 and was presented by Bob Harris on the British TV show “The Old Grey Whistle Test”. The album featured an exquisite sleeve with several pages illustrated by artist Dave Roe.

Jon Anderson has been recently working on a sequel of the album, to be titled “Songs of Zamran: The Son of Olias”. Anderson said in a December 2005 interview with Anil Prasad of Innerviews: “I’ve written the story, the concept, I’m working on the music and it’s just a slow process and it’ll take as long as it takes, but technically, the ammunition is coming through the MIDI guitar plus some of the modern electronic stuff.”

The sequel is apparently divided in six different episodes, for which Jon Anderson has also been working with several animators to take the project to a visual scale. The new work, which will feature Anderson playing all the instruments again, is supposed to be released by 2008.