Dean Baker – Constellations

Release date: 12th November 2018

‘Constellations’ is the first solo album from Dean Baker who, besides being an ‘associate member’ of Twelfth Night, (having played live with us since 2010, and made significant contributions to both the ‘Fact & Fiction’ and ‘Sequences’ albums we released in 2018), is probably best known as the keyboard player, main writer, and arranger for the UK ‘prog’ band Galahad.

His album been released through Avalon Records in conjunction with Oskar Productions, and here is what they say about it…

“You could say that ‘Constellations’ is an accidental album borne out of personal tragedy. Dean’s good friend Ray Chiles succumbed to cancer in 2018 and Dean subsequently inherited a large CD collection. He began listening to some of the gems contained within what was, in fact, more of a music library, including albums by iconic keyboard visionaries such as Jean-Michel Jarre, Kraftwerk, Vangelis and Tangerine Dream to name but a few.

After listening to, and re-acquainting himself with, their music over the course of the summer of 2018 Dean was massively inspired to write in a similar vein and before he knew it he had over twenty new tracks to work on! These were then whittled down to the ten tracks that appear on the final version of this album.

Along the way Dean called upon a few friends to contribute, including Lee Abraham and Stu Nicholson from Galahad (guitars and vocals respectively), as well Anastasia Coburg from Coburg on vocals.

You could say that the resulting album is paying homage to some of the pioneering synthesizer artists of the 1970s, but it is also still very much a Dean Baker vision incorporating modern production values and Dean’s very own musical slant on modern electronic music.”

‘Constellations’ is dedicated to music lover Ray Chiles (1959 -2018)