This album is a soundtrack to the book The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper. Some of the tracks actually accompany the text if you read it at just the right speed. Others are simply inspired by moments in the book. I'll leave it to you to decide which are which.

Rob wrote a set of track notes that he made for Stuart McLean to include in the cassette inlay of the original The Dark Outside edition of the album. "A kind of track-by-track introduction to the album."

Theme from The Dark is Rising:
An overall theme for the book, made up of four mini-themes (for the Dark, the Light, the Walker and the Hunt), which I wrote to work together here but which will also feature on their own later. The chiming, plucked instrument is a kantele, a Finnish folk harp, and the church bells are real ones from my field recordings.

The Strange White World:
I started this one by connecting my Hohner Pianet electric piano to my modular synth, using it to trigger various envelopes and oscillators as if it were all one complex instrument. What you hear is a one-take improvisation on that instrument - I literally hit record and played any old thing, and I was very excited when this melody came tumbling out.

White Horse:
A tune for when the white mare of the Light first appears. The melody for this track was the very first thing I wrote for the album, in autumn 2014, not that I knew it was going to be a whole album at that point.

Will's Theme (Essence of the Light):
The music Will hears when he wakes up is the most important melody in a book that's crammed with musical moments. Cooper writes that Will can't identify the instruments, so I worked hard to make my instruments sound organic but unearthly. Are they acoustic or synthesised? Actually they're both - they're acoustic wind instruments processed by the modular synth.

The Walker:
The main instrument here is a cura, a Turkish instrument with six strings arranged in pairs and frets made of fishing line. I found it in a backstreet shop in Istanbul and wrangled it home as hand luggage. There's a tightness in its sound, a pinched, scratchy quality that I thought suited the Walker perfectly.

Nothing Sinister About Maggie (Bonus Track):
A rather menacing piece for the moment Will encounters Maggie on the old way. To get the effect of being frozen in time I recorded the background noise my old synths make when I'm not playing them, then processed it over and over again to make it louder and turn it into a voice in its own right.

Flight from the Rider:
A theremin-fuelled wigout to accompany the chase sequence in chapter 2. It's rather more extended than the book, but you can hopefully hear the menace of the Rider, the white horse arriving, Will escaping from the dark clouds, and finally a reprise of "White Horse" as the mare takes Will to the doors.

Merriman and the Lady (Bonus Track):
I tried to evoke the feeling of the great hall, with a feeling of warmth from the big log fire and mysterious noises echoing around the rafters high above. A mixture of synths, found sounds and Maui xaphoon.

I Do Not Dance:
This is what I hear the musicians playing while Merriman and Will watch Hawkin in the crowd. At the critical point in the story the melody switches to the theme for the Dark, but in a major key this time, because the Dark is all duplicitous smiles at this point. And of course there are theremins, because, as we established earlier, theremins equals evil.

Gramarye:
This is for the moment Will opens the book. I focused on the joyous side of the learning, one moment swimming with fish and the next moment flying with eagles, rather than the melancholy. And of course everything to do with the Light comes in sixes, for the six signs, apparently including the number of beats in a bar.

The Hunting of the Wren:
Here I wanted the feeling of a marching folk band in the middle of a powerful supernatural event. The modular synth supplied the supernatural, and the folk instruments are a xaphoon played through a vocoder, a child's tambourine, and a Bontempi B1 toy keyboard.

The Coming of the Cold:
You can hopefully hear the snow falling in this one, as well as the theme for the Dark cropping up in the bass, and some remorseless synth drones towards the end as the cold sets in and supplies run out.

Liht Mec Heht Gewyrcan:
An accompaniment for the moment Will obtains the Sign of Fire. I'd recently traded one of my synths for a different one, a Roland Jupiter-4, and I had the Sign of Fire scene in my head while I was plugging in the Jupiter for the first time and noodling around on it to check everything worked. This track is the result. Again, everything here is a first take and most of it is improvised.

The Hunt Rides:
Finally, we hear Herne the Hunter ceremonially taking up his horned mask, summoning rather a lot of Radiophonic hounds, and giving chase to the Dark. At the end of the chase the cura is back as we hear the fall of the Walker. The Dark is vanquished for now... although of course you can summon it back any time by flipping the record and playing it again...