Edvard Graham Lewis & Mark Spybay are the collaboration that is LewisSpybay. There’s an album due on the 8th of November, it’s titled LewisSpybay. There’s a new single called Castle Neptune. Read on then give the track a listen below.
The pair met via an appearance on a podcast in November 2022, hosted by cEvin Key of Skinny Puppy. They hit it off immediately. “We did a live chat with Graham – which I think, went on for about three days” jokes Spybey.
It was Spybey who first broached the idea of a collaboration. “It was a bit like shy bairns get nowt: I just said ‘maybe we should make something together.’” And so, with no plan other than to see what might develop, the duo began to assemble the compositions at long distance. Indeed, Lewis and Spybey only met in the real world after the album had been completed.
“Mark sent half a dozen tracks in a stereo mix,” says Lewis. “And I looked at the ’topography’, to see where the spaces might be. So then I’d add to those areas. But then, when do you take it away? Sometimes you let it drop off a cliff, land in the shingle, and it gets washed out to sea again.”
The process moved at a pace. “Almost everything each of us brought, ending up being incorporated in some way.” Says Spybey. “We didn’t really go down any cul-de-sacs.” As Lewis observes “We have such a sympathetic tone.”
“Castle Neptune”opens up with a bright-eyed urgency, as a fat bass line bounces like a basket ball and Spybey’s keening wordless vocal add a sense of wonder. Then the piece suddenly drops away into an expansive bay of humming sound, pierced by intermittent blares of horn. However, as Lewis points out, this isn’t brass. “It was the sound of a train horn on the streets of Oakland.” Nevertheless it gives the album’s entry point a sense of the supernatural.
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