Crimson Creatures (2021–3)

Greenwood was a Prog band formed by Richard Stockdill (keyboards and songwriting) and Matt Cornes (bass and vocals) in summer 2021.

Crimson Creatures 2022 (L–R: Richard Stockdill, Matthew Cornes, Keith Nuttall, Mark Keniston) [link to official website]
Crimson Creatures: Richard Stockdill, Matt Cornes, Keith Nuttall, Mark Keniston

They sent three demos to Keith, who changed the arrangements and added guitars. The remixes earned him the jobs of guitarist and producer, and they set about working through the rest of the unfinished material. By April 2022, they had completed 12 songs and named themselves Crimson Creatures. Their music was a post-progressive grandchild of Pink Floyd and Van Der Graaf Generator.

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

Crimson Creatures EP

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

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

In the Green Wood

Meanwhile, the rest of their songs were sequenced as their 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, they 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, they 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, they decided that it deserved a release as a single.

The Difficult 2nd 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 band’s trajectory, Keith quit, agreeing to complete an EP of works in progress, released in October as A Cipher for the Lost.

Crimson Creatures is in hiatus.