It’s human nature, I suppose, to reflect on the year gone by as one looks ahead to the coming year. I am not immune from that urge itself but I view this both as something of a useful mnemonic device to help me organize my thoughts and, if nothing else, putting it in writing makes me makes me more accountable to myself than I might be otherwise.
So here we go. 🙂
Even though we managed the release of the “Quintus Interruptus” instrumental single in July, the vast majority of my music-related efforts early in the year were related to the September release of the long-awaited “Ptichka” EP and then, later, the December release of the “Whispers in the Snow” Christmas-themed single. The “Ptichka” EP has amassed almost 62K cumulative streams on Spotify by year’s end (in three months) and this doesn’t even count the nearly 30K additional streams that “Latibulate (Video Edit)” garnered separately (entirely in December). “Whispers in the Snow” also amassed over 45K Spotify streams in December by itself, which is very cool but it has already dropped down to nearly zero daily streams, unsurprisingly, and will likely remain there until next Christmas; I suppose that’s the nature of holiday-themed music. Quicksilver Night peaked with 21.8K monthly Spotify listeners on December 24th and 25th; I’ve always had more of a presence on Spotify than any other platform and I know it doesn’t mean a whole lot by itself but I’m nonetheless quite happy with that.
We released “Whispers in the Snow” on December 4th and “Latibulate (Video Edit)” on December 11th. This was taken on 12/25, Christmas Day. >>
The “Ptichka” EP in particular received a lot of positive reviews and, if you like, you can check out excerpts of those at the “Ptichka” discography page at https://quicksilvernight.com/ptichka. I really need to thank the team at C Squared Music (https://csquared.info/) for their outstanding promotional efforts.
I am thrilled to note a couple of year-end accolades here:
| << Not only am I humbly grateful to note the inclusion of the “Ptichka” EP by Quicksilver Night featuring Dikajee on Progrock dot com’s “2023 Best Progressive EP’s with Rich and Chuck” but also the song “Latibulate” in particular (track five of the EP) was listed as one of the “2023 Best Progressive Rock Songs with Richard and Chuck”! My sincere thanks to Richard Reyes and Chuck Simons. |
<< Similarly, I can scarcely believe that the “Ptichka” EP was counted as among both the “Best Progressive Rock Albums of 2023!” AND “The Absolute Best 25 Albums of 2023! (All Categories)” by Professor Mark of Progressive Rock Central.
Thank you, Mark Preising!
Now, moving ahead in 2024…
The musical ship looming largest on the Quicksilver Night’s production horizon right now is the “Seven Cities Blue” instrumental EP featuring saxophonist Jeff Saunders on all four songs along with other guest musicians. We are resuming recording in January with guitarist Jason Cale at the producer’s helm and providing his guitar prowess to two of the songs and we are very much on track for an April release. I describe the EP as “hybrid jazz/blues/rock in the vein of 2020’s ‘No Contest’” and if you liked that then I’m confident you’ll love “Seven Cities Blue”.
Also ahead in 2024, you can expect no less than four fully licensed cover songs by Quicksilver Night featuring Dikajee on vocals. We plan to release them one at a time on all major digital retailers concurrently with Dikajee’s Patreon activities. These four songs include “Words” as performed by Missing Persons and “Voices Carry” as performed by ‘Til Tuesday, songs that Dikajee and I originally planned to release concurrently with the “Ptichka” EP but decided against it at the time. We’re going to go ahead with them now this year. I’ve also completed arrangements for the hypnotically evocative “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak and emotionally wrenching “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran. The original versions of all four of these songs have lyrical depths that might be obscured by slick production and glossed over by time and familiarity with them but they are great songs and we’re going to have fun doing them. I’ve stuck quite close to the original musical arrangements – although tiny bits of unintended progginess have doubtlessly snuck in – and Dikajee will be handling the vocal arrangements herself. Dikajee and I also intend to complete production of the Christmas-themed “Dragon’s Eye View” in time for the 2024 holidays; we almost released it this past season but as production continued I began to feel as though it was feeling a little rushed and cobbled together for my tastes so I decided to defer its release until 2024; it’s probably just as well so that we weren’t competing with ourselves by releasing it concurrently with “Whispers in the Snow”.
Lastly, but by no means least, I am resuming production of Quicksilver Night’s next full-length album “We Are Also the Dreamt” this summer; an ambitious project, I expect to make some serious headway this year but I imagine it won’t see release until mid-2025. I’ve written all the music for the album – too much music, actually – and we’ve begun the production process. You can expect the usual array of special guest performers and musical collaborators and there will be some new faces in that crowd along with some familiar ones.
Let’s see how things develop.