Greetings Hermites,
The band has been taking a breather after the grueling work put into the release of Deliria: a Chronicle of 2020. But we’re not going anywhere. As is well known to our old fans, nearly all the first HS studio album, and parts of the second, Prophesies, were regularly performed live during the 1996-2000 period, but the only track from En Route ever performed live was our cover of Gustav Holst’s “Mars”, and none of the These Fragments tracks ever received a live performance. We would like to change that. In the near future we will again begin rehearsing, with the goal of putting together a live show that contains roughly 15-20 minutes of music each from En Route and These Fragments, as well as the entirety of Deliria. Our goal is to create a high-quality video recording of the resulting show/shows to serve as a counterweight to the bootleg-quality videos of our shows taken in the 1996-2000 period. While we think we know which tracks will be included from En Route and These Fragments, if you have a suggestion drop us a line by clicking on the CONTACT link of this website and leaving us a message, and who knows—maybe your suggestion will end up on the final product!
Welcome back, Hermites, and thank you for your patience! It has been a very long time: to be precise, four years and three months since our last album (a live album featuring music recorded between 1996 and 2006), and fifteen years and four months since our last studio album. Against all odds, the first Hermetic Science studio album in fifteen years has been released! Deliria: a Chronicle of 2020 featured a brash new lineup that represents a generational shift, with yours truly (keyboards), Jeffrey Ruiz (bass guitar), and Travis Strong (drums and percussives). It returned us to a live performance ideal, eschewing the extensive overdubs of the last two Hermetic Science studio albums, and is by some margin the heaviest and darkest Hermetic Science album, drawing styles as disparate as sixties hard bop, eighties and nineties metal, horror movie soundtrack motifs, and nineties trance into the classic Hermetic Science sound as it takes an unflinching look at the madness and mayhem of 2020. It also is our most cohesive album ever, essentially a single composition broken into nine tracks, with themes carried over and developed from track to track. Here is a listing of the nine tracks:
This is our second consecutive studio album for which Paul Whitehead, best known by prog rock audiences as Charisma house artist in the 1970s, especially on the early Genesis and Van der Graaf Generator releases, supplied the album artwork: the cover is his apocalyptic Armageddon Warm, intended for the band Armageddon's A & M debut release in 1975, but rejected by their label for being “too dark.” Well, the times have caught up with his vision, and we are proud to be able to feature this prophetic image some 48 years later.
The music was recorded on June 5 and 6, 2023, with post-production wrapping up in September. It has been released in CD format through the Hermeticum Records label (to order a CD, visit the CD Orders section of this website), and is of course also available for downloading and streaming: click here for details.
Cheers,
Ed Macan
Eureka, California, October 2023