The
new Zen Carnival album is here! 
(Updated ~ June 2006)
For those of you who have been waiting for the new Zen Carnival album,
it's been a long seven years.
But wait no more. The new album, entitled Bardo, has arrived.
Zen Carnival has been working on Bardo on and off since 1999. A
few of the songs on the new album were already written and arranged before
the first album was released, but they just weren't ready for recording
at the time (Solar Circles, The Gate, Shadows Speak). The rest of the
songs were written between 2000 and 2002. From 2003 until the present,
the band worked on perfecting the songs, a few of which went through multiple
arrangement overhauls.
Mike James:
It's hard to believe that it has taken so long for us to release the album. But we are all very happy with the final product.If we had decided to go into a studio to record this album, it probably would have been released years ago. But since we recorded it ourselves, we had the luxury of tweaking it as much as we wanted. Of course, this was both a curse and blessing.
The other factor is that our music is quite complex, which meant that it took a long time for us to write, record and mix the arrangements. Working long distance was another factor - Ken and I now live in the New York area, but Bill and Carl still live in the Boston area. Ken and I ended up recording many tracks remotely at our homes and then sending the files over the internet to Bill so that he could piece it together.
The music can be best described as progressive rock (please don't ask me to classify the sub-genre). There are a lot of melodic elements to the music, which is something that I feel is often lacking in a lot of the newer progressive rock music out there. Our previous album, Inheritance, was much more "typical" progressive rock, very reminiscent of Yes, Genesis, etc. This album on the other hand, is a lot harder to pinpoint. There are more styles and moods, ranging from jazz/fusion to straight-ahead pop/rock. All of the songs sound completely different from each other, but they still hold together as an album.
Bill Denison:
We are all pretty excited about the sound of the new album, especially after a significant studio upgrade. As with our last record, this one offers diversity of sounds and styles, and in some ways there is a bit more of an electronic/experimental approach. This new approach was fostered by the recent explosion in new software, techniques, etc. We feel we are probably heading away from the heavy sounds, although we all have a real hankering for them, and on some tunes we are embracing a real classical sensibility, while leaning toward a Euro electronic style on others.
Ken Pfeifer:
Finally, a new album! Whether the rest of the world has been waiting with baited breath or not may be debatable, but we're certainly ready...
I had always wanted the opportunity to tweak and tweak and tweak. But we reached a point where the temptations were overwhelming and we finally all felt the need to arrive. This has really become about finding balance between songwriting and recording. After all this, I've arrived at really being focused on the flow of writing, although of course it has been a crash course in studio recording as well!
I'm pleased and amazed at how our varied approach to each song has come together into a collection that works together. The go-with-the-flow approach has really worked, proving that our underlying philosophy has been sound.
The original Zen Carnival formula had some strong boundaries in terms of style and arrangement. I think I speak for all of us that we are really happy to have explored ideas that are outside of those boundaries. The new album and lineup demonstrate our interest in exploring beyond our earlier efforts. I think Bardo more adequately expresses our individual and collaborative musical ideas. All of us have the opportunity here to be songwriters on our own and also to write songs as a team.