It’s been eight years since ‘C’, but finally there’s some new Planet Claire material!

‘D’ was written and recorded in February 2024, almost accidentally. I was working on a bunch of new songs, just writing and writing and recording to see what stuck, and by the end of the month I realised I had a few instrumental bits and pieces that wouldn’t fit on a rocking Anecdata album – it was a surprise Planet Claire EP!

It opens with ‘Diablerie’, a snappy new wave number written at the start of the month while I was waiting for a day to have the house to myself to do some louder guitar recording. That’s followed up by ‘Dark Sky Reserve’, which – and this is 100 percent true – began life as a medieval/pirate styled folk tune. Realising that was a bad route to go down, I started putting it together as a synth instrumental, and it soon blossomed into something truly epic.

‘Diaspora’ was based on an old idea I had lying around – was originally meant to be a rock song, but it just wasn’t working, so it got retooled into spooky, icy synthpop.

‘Diogenic’ began life as a soft acoustic piece, but it wasn’t working – so once again synths came to the rescue.

‘D’ closes with ‘Dactyloid’, an experimental piece using a single synthesizer – a piece of software called Olga, which is meant to emulate a strange, broken Soviet-era machine.

And that’s that! Enjoy. Get it from Bandcamp (free/pay what you want) or stream it at Spotify, Amazon, YouTube Music and all the other usual places.

If you haven’t checked out my latest Anecdata release ‘A Better Plan B’, it’s a polished (relatively, by my standards) bunch of synth/rock/new wave/grunge tunes. Links to listen/download here. In the same sessions that produced this Planet Claire release, a whole new Anecdata album was written and mostly recorded, so expect that soon!