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“Let’s write a Latin-inspired song, learn some of it backwards, add some sub-bass, warped marimbas and loon calls and see what happens.” This is exactly how Lo Oa Soa, Lunar Path’s second composition, came to be. Well, maybe not in those exact words… Beginning with a Latin beat, vocals were added, resulting in quite a conventional song. Then, the entire thing was torn apart, played in reverse and snatches of the backwards version learned and recorded. During this process, the phrase Lo Oa Soa floated to the surface; typing it into a translator app revealed that it means “you are dead” in Sesotho. This appealed to the gothic souls of Lunar Paths and dictated the rest of their compositional decision-making processes.
Image by Linda Martin https://www.instagram.com/linjamart21

Fuse

Lo Oa Soa

Experiments involving live drums, electronic drums, sequencers and even a sampled dog bark formed the backbone of this track. Late night chats about this percussive spine ensued online—the two members of Lunar Paths live thousands of miles apart from each other, and in very separate time zones—and this got mixed in with talk of Ernest Shackleton’s diaries, NASA’s Juno Spacecraft ‘hearing’ Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, and the idea of writing a track where the beginning sounded very different from the end. A haunting, bluesy vocal and the defiant strains of a Cretan lyra sample sit atop the resultant narrative of exploration and conquest.
Image by Linda Martin https://www.instagram.com/linjamart21

Reverse

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Live drums, electronic drums and detuned bells were recorded and sent halfway around the world via email—the two members of Lunar Paths live thousands of miles apart from each other—and there was something about the rolling beat and the harsh but beautiful urban noises that evoked the idea of going for long walks in a city. Almost immediately, a sinuous melody started to wind its way out of the diverse sounds and rhythms. Each part of the percussion told a story, and it was grouped off into sections, layered and looped accordingly. A rough take of the vocal was recorded and complementary strings and bass added. All the while, Lunar Paths chit-chatted online about the Situationists and dérive theory, and some pleasurable-because-pointless urban walks were taken.
Image by Linda Martin https://www.instagram.com/linjamart21

Dérive

Now available on all major streaming platforms.
It began with an earworm, that turned into a riff, formed by stretching, cropping, transposing and then stitching together a fairly drippy guitar sample found on the enormous BandLab repository of freebies. The drummer heard it, said “yes, I love it—but try cranking it up to 165bpm” (as they do!). Then, he starts to send loads of percussion, 808s… Then, she starts arranging these, adding more riffs from augmented samples… Back and forth it flies online, whizzing between two continents, gathering new ideas, material and momentum, until eventually it’s ready for release. Ah, if only we’d had tech like this back in the day! MetaGoth#1 is a playful and danceable track full of palpable tension, fear, anger and defiance which we think you’ll love as much as we do. 

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Image by Linda Martin https://www.instagram.com/linjamart21

MetaGoth#1

Now available on all major streaming platforms.
It started with a set of percussive patterns in 6/8, which we layered and looped. To this we added gamelan and lyra samples, warped, stretched, transposed, cut to shreds and then stitched back together again. Then, after a little musing on the need for resistance in these troubling times, some terse and bluesy vocals were created. Finally, little shimmers and echoes were flown in, and the whole thing mixed, mixed and mixed again into a compelling, relentless, mesmerising thundercloud. 
https://www.lunarpaths.com  
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Rise

The drummer had been listening to some First Nation music, and, inspired by this, he got behind his kit. He put his percussive skills to excellent use and sent the resultant recordings to the singer, so that she could start stitching stuff together to form the basis of the emerging track. He also sent over a blistering, crackling shimmery bass riff, which she transposed to support a melody, as yet unwritten, and then she started to add samples of bassoon, flute and augmented lyra. Imagine the surprise when, out of this heady brew, something emerged that was part goth, part almost-hip-hop! Late night chats about the sorry state of the world, plus some encouraging signs of resistance, suggesting that the tide may be about to turn, led to the development of the lyrics, and out of this grew the melody. We love this eclectic, intercultural blend, and we hope that you will, too!

Shine

Featuring the mesmerising sound of the Armenian duduk, Yeraz means ‘dream’. Diane had been listening to the duduk for a good while, after accidentally stumbling across its beautiful sound on YouTube. When Kevin sent her a glorious rolling drum pattern that he had been working on, she had an idea... She found around a dozen duduk samples and warped, stretched and stitched them together, then did the same with some ethereal piano samples. Then it was time to loop and layer everything together. Kevin added more and more layers of intricate percussion, and finally Diane added her vocal. 

We think that Yeraz might be an example of ‘fourth world music’, a music of unknown and imaginary utopias, that welcomes what world music offers to post-punk in its fusing of the ancient with the futuristic. Thanks to our friend Sophie Harutyunyan for helping us to find a title for the song, and for her fascinating insights into Armenian language and culture.

Yeraz

While looking for samples of chimes, music boxes and glockenspiels to use in their earlier release, Glyph, Diane found a sample of antique sleigh bells, fell in love with the sound and immediately downloaded them for future use. Kevin heard this and created a rich and varied set of live and electronic drum tracks, and he pinged these across the Atlantic (Kevin is USA based & Diane lives in the UK and in Greece). A structure started to emerge as Diane started to add MIDI bass and a keyboard reminiscent of a Cure guitar sound. The icing on the cake was a magnificent riff created by Kevin that perfectly complemented the sleigh bells. Finally, a melody emerged, and lyrics were written, inspired by Margaret Atwood's novel Surfacing, specifically, the moment towards the end of the novel where the nameless protagonist seems to transform into the legendary loup garou, a mythical creature of the Canadian wilderness that is reminiscent of a werewolf.

Silvania

We are eternally grateful to the darkwave/post-punk communities for recognising and embracing us as one of their own, not least because, when we formed Lunar Paths in late 2021, we had no idea as to what musical genre we belonged! We simply threw stuff at the proverbial wall, in order to see what would stick. 
Our roots, as veterans of the original northern UK goth scene, undoubtedly played a part in determining our sound, but then so did the many seismic changes in the musical landscape that took place over the last four decades. 
We hear a lot of these influences in the new music of our peers, some of which sounds like it could easily have been made in the early 1980s, but, when it comes to pinning down and describing our own sound, it seems like an almost impossible task. 
Take, for example, this, our latest song, a downright peculiar blend of spoken word psychedelia shot through with sirens, darkwave drums and buzzing, post-punk guitars. We have not made anything like this to date. Indeed, each track that we make seems different from its predecessors–and yet we do undeniably have a ‘sound’ that is all our own, and recognisably ‘us’. 
So, how did Falling Star come to be? 
First of all, Kevin came up with an urgent, driving rhythm, soaked in subs. Diane found two blistering guitar samples, and proceeded to warp, stretch, transpose, slice up and stitch it all back together again. Kevin came up with a piano riff, and Diane created something that sounded a bit like a sitar. Then we added a bit of bodhrán, radio interference and tornado siren…. as you do. 
There was something about this tense mix of sounds that called to mind all those tragic, troubled people, real and fictional, who weigh so heavily on the hearts and minds of their friends because they are so clearly in some sort of distress, and who may or may not be a danger to themselves. The lyrics are rendered in spoken word, and in a cheery bubble-gum psychedelia that goes directly against the grain of this dark subject matter.

Falling Star

Kevin sent Diane his usual magnificent array of sinuous, powerful and complex percussion, including a seismic 808 and a devilish contra rhythm. Meanwhile, Diane had found one of those ‘steal this loop’ guitar riffs on Instagram which she promptly downloaded, then cut it to shreds, stitched a small section of it together again and looped the hell out of it. Initially this provided the backbone of the emerging song (though most of it didn’t make it to the final mix). Next, Diane got busy with the MIDI, crafting a bassline and a string section. “Bells, Kevin; I’m imagining that I can hear pealing bells.” This led Diane to her sample library, and then more warping, looping and stitching together occurred. “Drones, Diane: we need drones.” And so Kevin came back at her with some gorgeous, scraping, crackling, trembling loops. 
Lyrics are always the final piece of the puzzle. The vocal, like everything else, exists to serve the song. Diane typically begins by sketching out and then singing and recording a wordless melody. Then, she writes a gibberish set of lyrics, choosing words that suit the rhythm and vowel and consonant sounds that the song demands. These become a template for the writing of the ‘lyrics proper’. The subject matter is usually decided upon somewhere during this process, taking as its prompt a sound, a word, an idea, then running with it and seeing where it leads.   
This song found its subject relatively early on, thanks to a strange acoustic anomaly, where Diane thought that she could hear, somewhere between the drums and the drones and the guitar loop, someone whispering ‘heartshot’ over and over again. This led Diane to think about hunting, archery, Cupid’s arrow, and Artemis. Goddess of the hunt, defender of women and chastity, and famous for ruthlessly dispatching male violators, what would happen if Artemis fell in love?

Running for your life through a gallery of mirrors.
No way back, my heartshot prey.
Falling to your knees, you’re giving me the shivers.
Never was a carnivore before today.
When I loose my bow
And you know you’re the one to lose control.
My ever love, give up your soul.
Cold, dark night.
Ring around the moon bringing in the storm.
Cleaving from below and up to the apple,
Climb inside your skin and keep me warm.
When you died, and I cried
Silver whispers of desire,
Heart in my mouth and breathing fire.
Wake from your dream. No more goodbyes.
Take from my breath a thousand sighs.
Look at my soul, there in your eyes.
Your eyes on me, forever true.
Remember me. Remember you.

Heartshot

Kevin came up with some pounding subs, gritty sequencers and fierce drums. Diane responded with some killer samples, scraping noises and scratchy keyboard riffs. She packed it all up and went to her home in Greece, where she proceeded to stitch it all together. She discovered that the stone walls in her house made for lovely acoustics when she recorded her singing—the vocals in the verses are ‘dry’—and she captured the sound of cicadas in her garden one horrendously hot afternoon and threw them into the mix. All the while, she and Kevin talked online about the devastating fires, in Greece and all around this sad and angry world of ours. Slowly, the subject matter took shape.

Small boats. 
Big lies. 
Agendas in disguise. 
Red mist. 
Small minds. 
The dirt gets in your eyes. 
Redtop headlines 
Grow fear of other kinds. 
Red hands 
Won minds 
Take back the borderlines. 
No lies. 
No whys. 
Just things to learn by heart. 
Shared views. 
Short fuse. 
They’ll tear the world apart. 
And they all go together 
Under a spell. 
All go together 
Go straight to hell. 
Dead bees 
Charred trees 
And fifty-five degrees. 
Made-up disease. 
No trust in expertise. 
Not woke. 
Not broke. 
The ones they couldn’t gag. 
Cocksure 
Dirt poor 
Waving a tattered flag. 
And they all go together 
Lost in their spell 
But we’ll all fall together 
Fall straight to hell. 
Misled. 
Hope dead. 
The dirt gets in your heart.
Control your soul. 
They’ll tear your world apart. 
They can all go together 
All go to hell. 
All go together 
Go straight to hell.

BURN

It always amazes us to see the way that our tracks turn out, as we never start a new song with any preconceived ideas about ‘what it should sound like’. We simply make the music that we have to make, and let each new piece take whatever shape it will, while all we do is help it into the world. This one is no exception. Kevin sent Diane a half dozen ferocious drum patterns, a menacing synth line and a shimmering, blistering whip-cracker of an 808. She started stitching the parts together and, on first listen, both she and Kevin thought that they had a mighty, relentless, shouty mosh pit of a track on their hands. Then, she imported some dulcimer samples, warped, slowed down, transposed and otherwise messed with them, and lo and behold: what began to emerge was the most achingly romantic, bittersweet thing. Diane noticed that all of the files that Kevin sent her were labelled ‘September’, and the more she worked, the more her thoughts started to coalesce around this word, and its association with change, things shutting down, the beginning of the end…

September.
Farewell the summer rose.
A whisper on the air:
We all fall down.
Remember
Your changing face.
A haven from the end.
The leaves turn brown.

September

The start of it all!
November 15th, 2023 is the second birthday of Lunar Paths. To celebrate, we have decided to remix, remaster and re-release our first ever song, Sometime Never.
In the summer of 2021, Diane took a walk up the hill to the cemetery in the Cretan village where she has a little house. It was Dekapentavgoustos, or August 15, a festival marking the ‘falling asleep’ of the Virgin Mary. Candles had been lit in the lanterns on the graves, the cicadas were screaming, and the wind roared in from the sea, making the doors of the lanterns dance and rattle. Fascinated by the soundscape, Diane recorded it on her phone and sent the result to Kevin.
One day, a month or two later, Diane, now back in the UK, sat down at her computer and decided that she was going to teach herself how to make music using a DAW (digital audio workstation). She took some drum patterns that Kevin had sent to her, stuck them into her DAW, played around with them and started to learn all about looping and warping sounds, using sampled recordings of spinning coins and windchimes and triggering virtual instruments with a little MIDI keyboard. She remembered the recording from Crete and added it to the mix. The result was Lunar Paths’ first track, Sometime Never, which was completed on November 15th, 2021.
A meditation on mortality, the song features Diane counting in Greek the number of seconds that she has been alive, and asking what we have done with our lives to date. The sung vocal is in English, but quite a lot of it is reversed. The success of this experimental piece prompted Kevin and Diane to make a second track, and then a third, and a fourth—until finally they decided that they should probably share their work with the world and see what happens…
First available on March 13th, 2022 exclusively on SoundCloud, this extended, remixed and remastered version was released on November 15th, 2023.

Sometime Never

Kevin had a nightmare that woke him from his sleep. 
It was a terrifying stress dream, whose only redeeming feature was its amazing soundtrack! Fired up by this, he had to leave his bed in the middle of the night in order to record the drum patterns, lest he forget them by morning. 
Diane heard them and said that they conjured images of someone being hounded to breaking point: some good and honest soul trying to please but never able to work hard enough to satisfy an insatiable system. 
The refrain—‘another, another, another’—popped into her head as she started layering and looping drums. She made some crackly, bassy noises on her MIDI, and to these she added a siren and an eagle cry, augmented to sound like screams and wails. 
Lyrics came from late night discussions about friends and former colleagues who, like so many of us, were made to feel like ‘useful idiots’ at some point, manipulated by the fantasy that they are appreciated, into giving their all—to a job, to a relationship--until they finally wake up to the fact that there is no reward, no prize, no cheque in the post. In a system that runs on exploitation, whose life blood depends on selling the lie that hard work will be rewarded, and where the prevailing fiction is the idea that justice and fairness will prevail, waking up is the first step.

Halo

This track features the voice and words of legendary Irish actor and writer Ben Keaton, who Diane worked with back in the days before Lunar Paths came to be. Among his many talents, Ben is a poet, and his YouTube channel features a lot of his beautiful spoken word pieces.

A fan of Lunar Paths, Ben suggested the idea of a collaboration, and so Diane asked him to send her something that he had created. He obliged, and sent her a recording of his poem, New, with the generous instruction that she could do with it as she pleased.

Meanwhile, Kevin and Diane had been discussing their fondness for triphop and shoegaze, specifically Portishead and My Bloody Valentine, and this prompted Kevin to send Diane some percussion with a distinctly triphop flavour.

Diane wrote some MIDI basses and a chiming, bell-like arpeggio. Next, she found a sub bass drone, and went to work building the song. She found several shoegazey samples and warped, stretched and layered these.

Suddenly, the song started to resemble the melancholy and moody soundtrack from Twin Peaks! Inspired by this, Diane created a Julee Cruise type vocal to compliment Ben’s spoken word, which she had edited and then threaded through the emerging song; she also went back to the basses and added a good dollop of Lynchian tremolo and reverb.

The result is a tender, honest and moving song about the end of a relationship. With its slow tempo and atmospheric sounds, it’s a beguiling little number ideal for shattering and reassembling a broken heart.

New (feat. Ben Keaton)

New (feat, Ben Keaton)

Wouldn’t life be wonderful if human beings could wake up one morning and simply decide to stop fighting each other and start working together, for the benefit of everyone and the entire planet? Isn’t that what most of us want? What’s stopping us? Haven’t we got more in common than the superficial things that continue to divide us? 
As we pieced this song together, these were the thoughts that kept coming to the forefront of our minds. It started with a collection of percussive patterns that Kevin sent to Diane. She started to layer and loop, and found a sample of an oud, which she stretched, transposed, duplicated and added to the mix. Next came brass and woodwind samples, to which Kevin immediately added some bodhran. Diane got out her MIDI keyboard and created some drones—drones are becoming something of a Lunar Paths signature!—and she also wrote a bright little riff to counterpoint the sonorous boom of Kevin’s foreboding arp. 
We were blown away by how rousing and proud the chorus sections started to sound, and how they contrasted with the yearning lament of the verses. The song deserved lyrics that were equally rousing, equally yearning. Then, one night, in conversation on Messenger, Kevin used the phrase “a rising tide…” and everything fell into place: the lyrics had to complement the pan-global vibe of the music.  

A rising tide
Will lift us all
But only
When we are one.
A toxic state,
A trade in hate,
In othering,
In murdering,
In fear.
Divided, we fall.
Rise up up up, look over the wall!
Hand in hand we’re over the wall!
Forgotten sun,
Pervasive night.
Awake
And be the light.
A star at dawn,
A mind reborn,
Recovering,
Discovering,
When we’re together
We soar.
Rise up up up, look over the wall!
Hand in hand we’re over the wall!

A Star at Dawn

A Star At Dawn

Veterans of the original northern UK goth scene, the two members of Lunar Paths reside in the US and Europe, making music together online since late 2021. With memorable hooks woven through intricate, powerful percussion, laced together with haunting vocals, their eclectic sound shares traits with postpunk, darkwave & alternative indie artistes. Their music transcribes what they love, documents where they have been, and hints at where they are going.

Lunar Paths

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