We will begin 2012, Unseen Worlds Records’ fifth year as a label, touching upon two firsts – our first issuance of an album of newly written and never before released material, and the first artist we did a release with, the great “Blue” Gene Tyranny.  Since our re-release of his first album, Out of the Blue, in 2007, “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s other early Lovely Music LPs – the cleverly studious Just for the Record and the prescient, still-new sounding The Intermediary – have been duly released in digital formats by Lovely, and his song cycle / lyrical discourse album The Invention of Memory / The Somewhere Songs came out on the Mutable Music label.

Detours is “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s first album of new piano works since 2003’s Take Your Time.  A beautifully recorded collection of tracks composed between 2004 and 2010, Detours belongs to a rarefied class of supremely listenable and beautiful piano albums that are not encumbered by any new-age shabbiness.  It possesses the sort of timeless and elegant romanticism so unpretentious and accomplished it seems to at once effortlessly canonize itself.

The four pieces on Detours have their origins in disparate sources of inspiration – a longtime friend from San Francisco, a chance visit to a Quaker meetinghouse, a choreographed dance, philosophical intuition. Harmonic discourses begin at a pre-determined location and wind up at a totally unexpected place.  Tyranny is a master pianist, able to follow mood and impulse to uncharted new territory.

Look for Detours to arrive in record stores January 2012 and, as always, you can order direct through us.