About The Glimmer Room
Andy Condon lives in a self imposed exile in the wilds of north Essex, and has worked as The Glimmer Room since the turn of the century.
After many years building a career predominantly in the live music scene, Andy grew tired of all the travelling and general upheaval that life in a busy band entails, and thereafter retreated into the safety of the studio, where he worked as part of a short-lived experimental dance collective called Neesh.
After weeks of programming, the first Neesh album was finalised in a marathon 3 day studio session that was more like a 3 day party, with folks dropping in, hanging out and maybe even contributing to the recording, and the 5 track EP, called simply Neesh, was eventually released through the sadly now defunct Landscape Recordings label. All this talk of studio parties and collectives is a mile away from The Glimmer Room, but for one thing so, please, bare with me.
In amongst all the 909-rhythms and thumping 303-basslines was a small track called Still Waters, which quickly became something of a turning-point for Andy - a laid-back, down-tempo piece, that hung on a processed Enya sample, a slowed down break-beat, all held together by a young rapper who left shortly afterwards, and ended up in the US working with De la Sole. This track also turned out to be the end of Neesh and the start of The Glimmer Room because Andy had finally found his true path, in a mode of music he wanted to explore more deeply.
That was early 1997 and, five years later, the first Glimmer Room album, Tomorrows Tuesday, was released in early 2002 on the then Sheffield electronic music label Neu Harmony. The thirteen tracks that make up Tomorrow's Tuesday evolved from chopped-up breaks and beats, via lush synthesiser melodies, which characterise Andy's trademark atmospheric, layered soundscapes and drew favourable comparisons with acts as diverse as Moby, Enigma and Mike Oldfield's Songs of Distant Earth.
Grey Mirrors followed in 2004. Released on Andy's own A-frame Media label, Grey Mirrors began as an experiment after Andy had read about how the KLF had recorded their classic Chill Out album in just one weekend. Andy set himself the goal of doing just the same, and the result was a remarkable album consisting of just one 42 minute piece that quickly became an ambient classic. In composing Grey Mirrors, Andy used the view from his window as inspiration, taking in as many influences as possible, and the resulting album is a musical exploration of a time and place that has a feeling highly reminiscent of an old English black and white film.
Grey Mirrors was released to overwhelming critical acclaim, receiving world-wide radio play and establishing a genuine personal connection with people from all corners of the globe. The release of this album also saw Andy's return to the stage, with an appearances at the Alpha Centuri electronic music festival in Holland, and later, at a special appearence in the Awakenings series of concerts in the UK.
Moving on from Grey Mirrors, 2007 saw the release of the limited edition album, Now We Are Six, also on the A-Frame label. NWAS is a collection of tracks recording first 6 years of The Glimmer Room's life and which featured on various magazine cover disks and compilations but were otherwise unavailable. This was Andy's first album to be available digitally through i-Tunes and Amazon, and was soon followed by Grey Mirrors as Andy pushed forward with this new medium.
2007 also saw the release of a Glimmer Room re-mix of Komputer's Like A Bird, on the world-famous label, Mute Records.
Following more than two and a half years of hard work, Andy's third studio album Home Without The Journey was released in late 2008, once again on A-frame Media. Home Without The Journey illustrates a more experimental side to Andy's work, and is possibly his most introspective work to date.
What else? Well, future adventures include possible collaborations with ex-Ultravox and Magazine guitarist Robin Simon and his brother Paul, and will begin just as soon as work schedules permit.
