BIO

In 2021, a chance encounter on social media reunited two veterans of the original northern UK goth scene. He had stayed in the music business, she had branched out into theatre and academia, but they had both retained an uncannily intuitive feel for each other’s creative processes. Despite the thousands of miles that now separate their homes and studios, they started making music together again... and so Lunar Paths was born. Since their last collaboration, the music scene has changed and developed in so many exciting and unforeseeable ways, and this is reflected in their eclectic blend of musical styles.

The music of Lunar Paths has been described as cinematic, atmospheric, evocative and moving. It is also playful, romantic, intercultural and adventurous. With memorable hooks woven through intricate and powerful percussion and laced together with haunting vocals, our music is hard to categorise: though we share a number of traits with darkwave, post-punk, new goth, organic electronic, ‘intelligent dance’ and global, jazz and indie artistes, our sound is a unique blend of all of the aforementioned musical styles, and more besides.

Our music transcribes what we love, documents where we have been,

and hints at where we are going.

We are eternally grateful to the darkwave/post-punk communities for recognising and embracing us as one of their own, not least because, when we formed Lunar Paths in late 2021, we had no idea as to what musical genre we belonged! We simply threw stuff at the proverbial wall, in order to see what would stick. Our roots, deep in the '80s postpunk scene, undoubtedly played a part in determining our sound, but then so did the many seismic changes in the musical landscape that took place over the last four decades. We hear a lot of these influences in the new music of our peers, some of which sounds like it could easily have been made in the early 1980s, but, when it comes to pinning down and describing our own sound, it still seems like an almost impossible task. Each new track that we make astounds and surprises us, because each one is different from its predecessors –- and yet, we do undeniably have a sound that is all our own, and recognisably ‘us’.

OUR PROCESS

People have been asking how Lunar Paths make music, given that the two of us live thousands of miles apart from each other, and have not met face to face in many years. To date, all of our recent communications have been via email and Messenger. This often occurs in the middle of the night for one of us, as we each live in very separate time zones. It is on these and other electronic platforms that our songs are born, nurtured and released into the world.

Typically, one of us gets an idea—a drum pattern, an ambient sound, a noise, a riff, a sample. This is recorded and pinged halfway around the world via email. It eventually gets imported into a DAW and we start structuring and adding to it—layering, looping, stretching. Virtual instruments are created via a MIDI keyboard, samples brought in and warped, transposed, distorted, or sequencers used to trigger sounds that straddle the melodic and the percussive. At some point, vocals are added. After each contribution, the song flies back and forth through cyberspace, and new suggestions, additions and changes are made. While all of this is going on, we chat online about our lives, our interests, what we have been reading, watching, listening to, the state of the world…and, of course, about the song as it emerges.

You can read all about the making of each of our releases and learn more about how each individual track came to be on BandCamp and on SoundCloud.

ABOUT US

Percussionist Kevin Hunter and vocalist Diane Dubois were members of the band Cold Dance in the 1980s. They released two EPs on Xcentric Noise and played the northern goth circuit for two years, landing some major supports and getting plenty of airplay from John Peel. Kevin left to join Skeletal Family, who signed to Chrysalis, but Kevin quickly realized that the label wanted a pop-goth crossover, so he quit the band, not quite knowing what to do next. He was offered a job as a drum tech, and this led to work transporting bands and ultimately to tour management.

For the next 17 years Kevin worked with a variety of bands and genres, including Mutabaruka and Beatnigs. Later, he worked with Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, and did a US tour with Billy Bragg. An absolute epiphany occurred when Kevin began working for Pale Saints, doing exciting shows in small, packed out, sweaty clubs. This led to a European and a Japanese tour supporting Pixies and eventually becoming Pixies’ production manager. Over the two intense years that followed, Kevin was also taking care of Lush, and worked with other 4AD acts, including live coordination for Cocteau Twins.

Soon after, Kevin was asked to look after Smashing Pumpkins on their first solo European tour, prior to being approached by Irish Marxist hip hop crew Marxman, playing support to Depeche Mode on a full six-week tour of European arenas. Kevin was asked to fill in on drums, and he remained in the Marxman drum throne while acting as manager for the entire tour and also for the support shows with U2 that followed.

The next two years brought two world tours with M People, with Kevin acting as tour/production manager, running concurrently with working as in-house tour consultant for Deconstruction Records and coordinating live performance by other artists on the roster including Lionrock/Justin Robertson, Death in Vegas, The Grid/Dave Ball, Sasha, BT and Chemical Brothers. After this, Kevin worked for fifteen months with producer supergroup Apollo 440.

Then came a major change: Kevin quit the music business in 1999 due to the then widespread uncertainty about what was going to happen to the live touring industry. He went back to a very early interest in food, opened a coffee bar in the UK, which morphed into a bistro, ran that for six years and then went to work as a chef before deciding to move to the US with his long-suffering wife. This move led to his current position running two kitchens in Chicago: a farm-to-table high concept restaurant and an artisan burger bar.

The need to make music never goes away, so all this while, Kevin was making little notes of ideas for all things drum-related. Then, one day, he ran into Diane on social media, fell to chatting… and now they are working together again after all this time as Lunar Paths.

Diane’s story is maybe a bit more straightforward, and though it features quite a lengthy detour away from making music, she does get back there in the end. When Cold Dance broke up, Diane, then around 20 years old, decided that it was time to go to university; She studied a combined literature-theatre-history-philosophy kind of thing, got hooked on an idea about myths and archetypes and stayed on to do a PhD. Meanwhile, she started a little theatre company, taking shows around the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire region, and making an annual trip up to the Edinburgh Fringe, where she was lucky enough to appear in the European premiere of Sondheim’s Assassins. Diane freelanced as an actor, director and writer for various theatre companies and appeared in around twenty short independent films. In the late 1990s Diane wrote a notorious play which received a lot of ‘scandalised’ press coverage. Diane has also written theatre reviews for The Scotsman and edited the Journal of Gender Studies.

At the same time that all of this was going on, Diane was being offered more and more teaching at the university, which she took on, ‘just in case the theatre thing didn’t work out’. She sang in a few bands too, but nothing serious. Then one day Diane woke up and realised that she was working full time in academia! The university asked her to explore the market for a drama degree and she ended up founding the School of Performing Arts at the University of Lincoln in 2003. She initially ran it in a former gym above a pub on campus, working alongside Michael Earley, an amazing academic who taught Jodie Foster at Yale and was a close friend of Arthur Miller. Then, Diane was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and had to dial right back on doing live performances. She carried on with a bit of directing and writing, and the Performing Arts department grew, from just 18 Drama students in an old gym to include, alongside Drama, programmes in Dance, Music, Playwriting, Technical Theatre and more, at undergraduate and at postgraduate levels and based in a purpose built 440 seat theatre with four studios.

Diane took early retirement in 2019, the plan being to move to Greece with her long-suffering husband, a fine art graduate and senior lecturer in Media. Then, one day, she awoke to the news that Boris Johnson had managed to lose her access to healthcare in Greece post Brexit, so the long anticipated move was off. Diane threw herself into drawing, painting and working with cat charities, in the UK and in Crete, fostering and doing TNR work. She and her husband bought a little old stone house on the coast of northern Crete, planning to make the best of a bad situation and to go there for long holidays. Then, the pandemic descended.

Going a little bit stir crazy during lockdown, and with her long-imagined future having gone out of the window, she decided to completely renovate their big old Victorian house in the UK; it is fair to say that she was looking for something meaningful to do.

Then, out of the blue, Diane got a message from Kevin, who had found her on Facebook. At first they talked about remastering the Cold Dance EPs, but it soon became apparent that they were bursting with ideas for new songs. Kevin was already familiar with using DAWs but Diane was going to have to learn it all from scratch. Suddenly, lockdown was looking a whole lot more interesting! One day, Diane sat down with some drum patterns that Kevin had sent to her months earlier, stuck them them into her DAW, played about with them and started to learn all about looping, warping, using samples and a little MIDI keyboard with VSTs to create sounds and stitch them together. The result was Lunar Paths’ first track, Sometime Never, which was completed in November 2021.

That first foray really defined the Lunar Paths process, where works in progress are pinged back and forth across the Atlantic, along with lots of chats on Messenger, when it’s usually the middle of the night for either Kevin or Diane, until they both agree that a track is completed.

Since November 2021, Lunar Paths have created around a track a month, discovering their sound as they go, an eclectic blend of genres, interests and influences, full of where they have been, and also suggestive of all the exciting places where they might be heading in the future.

The Story of Sometime Never, the first ever track by Lunar Paths:

In the summer of 2021, Diane took a walk up the hill to the cemetery in the Cretan village where she has a little house. It was the Greek festival of Dekapentavgoustos, or August 15, an annual event marking the ‘falling asleep’ of the Virgin Mary. Candles had been lit in the lanterns on the graves, the cicadas were screaming, and the wind roared in from the sea, making the doors of the lanterns dance and rattle. Fascinated by the soundscape, Diane recorded it on her phone and sent the result to Kevin.

One day, a month or two later, Diane, now back in the UK, sat down at her computer and decided that she was going to teach herself how to make music using a DAW (digital audio workstation). She took some drum patterns that Kevin had sent to her, stuck them into her DAW, played around with them and started to learn all about looping and warping sounds, using sampled recordings of spinning coins and windchimes and triggering virtual instruments with a little MIDI keyboard. She remembered the recording from the cemetery in Crete and added it to the mix. The result was Lunar Paths’ first track, Sometime Never, which was completed on November 15th, 2021.

A meditation on mortality, the song features Diane counting in Greek the number of seconds that she has been alive, and asking what we have done with our lives to date. The sung vocal is in English, but quite a lot of it is reversed. The success of this experimental piece prompted Kevin and Diane to make a second track, and then a third, and a fourth—until finally they decided that they should probably share their work with the world and see what happens…

Listen to Sometime Never here.