TesseracT to release ‘Polaris: Tour Edition’ in September

July 14, 2016 James Weaver

Progressive metal outfit TESSERACT have announced they are releasing a special edition of Polaris in September!

Following from the reception of Polaris, TESSERACT will release a special edition of the record in September. Titled Polaris: Tour Edition, the 2CD bundle will include the record itself and a bonus disc titled Errai which contains four re-imagined tracks. Survival, Cages, Tourniquet and Seven Names have been re-imagined by the band’s long standing live producer and sound engineer Aidan O’Brien.

Speaking about the re-worked tracks O’Brien comments, “The fascinating thing about taking a track apart to remix, rework, or re-imagine it, is being able to look at each individual element and figure out exactly what makes it tick as a composition. In the case of Survival, it was amazing to see how the track still retained a real power and drive even when the distorted guitars and drums were stripped away, and it was very exciting to experiment with rebuilding the track around a basic chord structure and Dan‘s vocal by using piano, synths and a handful of sound design tricks to push it into a darker and more cinematic direction. Using that as a base to build on meant that when I brought the track back to the band they were able to reinterpret a lot of what they had originally written in a totally new context – capitalising on that darker sound and resulting in an arrangement, which in some ways is much lighter and sparser but in others is far more brooding and menacing.”

Listen to the re-imagined version of Survival here:

Vocalist Dan Tompkins says, “it’s been fantastic to re-visit and re-work the vocals to some of the Polaris tracks from a different angle and with the benefit of time and space. The normal process of writing TESSERACT songs starts with the creation of the music followed by the lyrical content; this time Acle and Aidan have stripped away the music and re-created the songs based around the vocals. As a result this has allowed much more breathing space between both and also highlighted much more detail in the performance.”