Splinters & Sparks

'Boy In The Attic' is in the can, so to speak. Now it's up to the record company to begin their campaign to find the optimum release date, the right time to tour and how we proceed.

One thing I've done is to encapsulate sixty-six years of music into a timeline of sorts.

So that's what follows... All questions and comments to casimirg@live.co.uk, for all other enquiries: sarah@raggedmoon.com

Cas Greenfield began his musical journey back in the late 1950s. As a boy he used one of the first commercial reel-to-reels to record sound-scapes and ambient pieces before creating more conventional song forms with the advent of skiffle and folk and his first acoustic guitar in the early 1960s.

Cas has a curious mind and although the instrumental mood pieces form a large part of the back catalogue, Cas is first and foremost a lyricist, couched in the rhythms of blues, funk and the Beat Poets, infused with the pop sensibilities of Beatles, Pet Shop Boys, Angeleena Presley, Gravitonas and the Army Of Lovers.

These and more inform the world of Cas Greenfield. But then so do Porter, Cage and Astaire. This makes for an interesting set of influences, an interesting set of songs.

As a live performer, Cas has been on stage from the mid 1960s onward, from De Melkweg to Womad, from Castle Street Methodist Church to the inner sanctum of Stonehenge.

Cas thrives on experimentation and will take one chord and turn it into an epic track, or will make a complex chord sequence seem deceptively simple.

‘Boy In The Attic’ is a case in point. The album represents the culmination of a series of recordings that span four decades, brought together in the past eighteen months to stunning effect.

Two of the tracks first saw the light of day in 1977 and were only re-discovered when Cas digitised an old two-inch master tape at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio.

One track, ‘Oh Baby’, was a one-take guitar and vocal piece that is truly beautiful and yet had remained unheard from the time of the recording. Cas simply added a gentle cello quartet to complete the song.

Another; ‘Poison Pen’, uses the bass, drums, backing vocals and Cas’s original guitar and has been transformed into a new song. One of the murder songs as it happens.

And so, the old man sings and performs with his younger self – a truly spine-tingling experience.

Some of the new album tracks were recorded at a small demo studio where the intensity and magic of the first takes transcend the lo-fi ambience. These tracks have been augmented and find their place among the most recent recordings.

The final recordings for ‘Boy’ emerged from the creative hotbed of the Ragged Moon Studios in Gloucestershire with co-producer Michael Cooling adding his magic touch to the album.

‘Boy’ is now complete, a true journey through the life of a writer and musician still absorbed in the creative process, a passion undimmed by the passage of time.