Daniel Land - In Love with a Ghost (2016)

After a three year hiatus, Daniel Land has announced the forthcoming release of his 'In Love With a Ghost' LP, undoubtedly his most complicated and textured record to date. This album follows albums 'Love Songs For The Chemical Generation' and 'The Space Between Us' by Daniel Land & The Modern Painters. It was recorded over the three years following that group's disbanding, at a time when he seriously considered giving up making music. The first single from this release is 'New York Boogie-Woogie', along with a video based on footage Daniel Land himself filmed in New York.

Daniel Land explains, "This is an album about cities. It is an album about reinvention, and starting your life over. It is an album about growing up, finding love, and settling down. And to a lesser degree, it is about the damage that can be done to a person, or a family, by falling in love with the wrong person.

"With 'In Love With A Ghost', I came full circle for a while by incorporating a whole bunch of influences that pre-date my love of dream-pop and shoegaze. I really wanted to make a colourful, widescreen, detailed record. When I started the album, I didn't have a live band, and most of the tracks were written on the piano, for my own amusement, rather than for a group with three guitarists."

Daniel suffered a series of health issues midway through making the album, including a chronic inner-ear infection that left him partially deaf for over a year and also prone to bouts of dizziness.

"Unable to make music, and living in a new city made me feel, at times, powerfully depressed. This became a crisis of confidence that went very deep and it did seem, for a while, that I would never find my way back to making music again. Finishing the album was a process that involved re-evaluating my life and overhauling my relationship to music, and coming out of the other side more healthy, more humble, and more grateful. It's good to be back again," says Daniel.

The album was recorded at various locations including London, Manchester, Devon, California, and New York. It features nearly twenty musicians including members of Daniel Land & The Modern Painters, Andrew Saks (Sway/ASAKS), Gerard Hopes (Little Nova Sound), and members of Daniel's new live band. The record involved Brin Coleman, aka the prolific ambient composer Bing Satellites, who was involved with the record from the start to the end, playing multiple instruments, helping with the production, and even co-writing some of the music.

Daniel Land has been releasing dream-pop and ambient music for nearly a decade, having developed a unique blend of shogaze and confessional song writing. Drowned in Sound said that the first album 'Love Songs For The Chemical Generation' is "one of the finest records of its time", while NME says the single "Within The Boundaries" was "like Slowdive reimagined by Phil Spector".

Daniel also releases atmospheric landscape music under the name riverrun. He has collaborated with German electronica genius Ulrich Schnauss, in part through his membership in dream-pop supergroup Engineers at the time of their third album 'In Praise of More'. He has also collaborated with such artists as The Steals, Bing Satellites, and Ask For Joy.

Lauded by BBC's Guy Garvey, Marc Radliffe, Tom Robinson, and many others, he makes the kind of music that Rob Da Bank of BBC Radio 1 also commends, saying "You can't help think the late John Peel would have loved".