Josh wrote:The following isn't really speculation, but maybe fodder for future speculation.
For those of you who have siblings, maybe you've already considered this, but sometimes I wonder if after a lifetime of growing up together, and decades of working and creating music and art together, can the long gaps between releases be attributed not just to their level of perfectionism, but also to how Mike and Marcus relate to one another over the years? Typically, as people grow older, even close siblings or lifelong friends go in different directions, hold different views, want different things, ect.
I imagine it can't always be easy to work closely with your brother no matter how deep of a bond they share. And now, as two people reaching middle age, raising families and so forth, perhaps the idea of hunkering down and trying to create something amazing just isn't as necessary or exciting as it used to be. I mean, think of all the time they've spent together since childhood and all the things that have happened up until now. We have no idea what goes on between the two, but we know it's a lot of history and maybe not always good times.
One last thought. Tomorrow's Harvest, which as we've been told is an homage composers who scored sci-fi and horror flicks from the 70's and 80's, is also an album that tells the story of the apocalypse, or the collapse of everything as we know it. When you make that record and put it out, where the fuck do you even go from there? Sometimes I think they painted themselves into a corner. Perhaps this was intentional, done as a means to really force them to think differently on their next project, or maybe that was just what it ended up as. Again, we'll probably never know.
Great post. Thanks for sharing. I'd like to reply to your last paragraph with one of their quotes:
HUMO: "'Tomorrow's Harvest' sounds pretty dark, it's easy to picture scenes from the outstanding zombie series 'The Walking Dead', almost like post-apocalyptic poetry"
"Sandison: "I'm not going to deny that we found some of the tone of the record in obscure cinema of the late seventies and early eighties, but other than that i'll have to disappoint you: the theme we had in our heads was everything but apocalyptic. More in the line of 'how are we going to adjust ourselves in a world that soon will change very drastically?'. It just seems so inevitable. Without explaining too much - I rather let the listener figure it out - there's a chronology in the song titles and in the atmosphere of the songs, they're chapters in a longer story"."
https://bocpages.org/wiki/Talk_To_The_Hand,_Chokri