Attempting to conjure some ancient Greek magic...with a potion of tortoise shell & shard of goats horn! The recreated ancient Greek tortoise shell lyre featured in this album, was custom-made for me in modern Greece, by Luthieros:

https://www'luthieros.com

The recreated lyre features an actual foraged Greek land tortoise shell as a resonator,

Attempting to conjure some ancient Greek magic...with a potion of tortoise shell & shard of goats horn! The recreated ancient Greek tortoise shell lyre featured in this album, was custom-made for me in modern Greece, by Luthieros:

https://www'luthieros.com

The recreated lyre features an actual foraged Greek land tortoise shell as a resonator, a soundboard of goat skin, gut strings & a plectrum of carved goats’ horn - about the nearest thing one can get, to being able to take the Elgin lyre out of its display cabinet at the British Museum & actually being able to play on it!

The album cover of this release, features a statue of Hecate, the ancient Greek goddess of magic & the miraculously surviving 2,400-year-old Elgin lyre (an ancient Greek tortoise shell lyre preserved in the British Museum), whose ancient musical magic I attempt to evoke in the original musical creations for recreated tortoise shell lyre which feature in this release.

In my efforts to 'carry on where the ancients left off', I like to experiment in specific sections of the melodies featured in this album, with a subtle fusion of both ancient lyre timbres and contemporary studio effects, which include the use of reverbs sampled from actual caves & attempting to evoke a dream-like feel to the music, by sometimes adding delays to specific phrases.

In keeping with the essence of magic & mysticism in ancient Greek mythology which I set out to convey in this release, there are 9 tracks I settled on to include in this compilation. The number 9 had a great deal of mythological significance during classical antiquity. Indeed, there were nine Muses in Greek mythology - Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (erotic poetry), Euterpe (lyric poetry), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (song), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy) and Urania (astronomy).

Also, according to Greek mythology, it takes nine days for an anvil to fall from heaven to earth, and nine more to fall from earth to Tartarus. According to the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo. Leto laboured for nine days and nine nights to give birth to her son, Apollo, the ancient Greek god of music.