Crimson Creatures

Greenwood was a Prog band formed by Richard Stockdill (keyboards and songwriting) and Matt Cornes (bass and vocals) in summer 2021. They sent three demos to me, and I changed the arrangements and added guitars. The remixes earned me the jobs of guitarist and producer.

We set about working through the rest of the unfinished material. By April 2022, we had completed 12 songs and named ourselves Crimson Creatures. Our music was a post-progressive grandchild of Pink Floyd and Van Der Graaf Generator.

The band always intended to play live, if possible, so we recorded the songs with minimal overdubs, and they could be performed pretty much as they were.

Crimson Creatures EP

We showcased 3 very different flavours of the songs as our debut EP, Crimson Creatures, released in May.

The next stage was performance. We started to rehearse, and went through several unsuitable drummers over the next few months.

In the Green Wood

Meanwhile, the rest of our songs were sequenced as our debut album, In the Green Wood, which was released in July.

Fragments

The songs so far had lasted around the 3 to 6 minute mark. So, during development of the second album, we decided to tackle a more ambitious composition, Fragments.

The ‘song’ evolved into a theatrical piece about a woman in a catatonic state. Over the summer, we focused on Fragments, and it began to take on a life of its own. When it was finished, rather than wait for the album’s completion, we decided that it deserved a release as a “single”.

The Difficult 2^nd Album

2023 saw the addition of Dorset veteran Mark Keniston as Crimson Creatures’ chilled permanent drummer. Rehearsals stepped up a notch, and the gigs began in spring.

Work on the second album continued slowly, and the old “difficult” cliché started to kick in. In July, unhappy with the shift to performance and ego, I quit, agreeing to complete an EP of works in progress, released in October as A Cipher for the Lost. Crimson Creatures disbanded.