Tune in to Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone on BBC6 music, Sunday 18 February 1700-2000 to hear William D Drake live in session.

For more information, please visit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/freakzone/

Yew's Paw
New album release February 5 2007

William D Drake is a composer, songwriter and performer in his own right as well as being a contributing member of the critically acclaimed North Sea Radio Orchestra. The work of a highly original and eccentric figure, Drake's music is flavoured with tastes developed from early childhood. The sense of dark antiquity in 78 rpm records of Debussy, Paderewski and Rachmaninov, silent film and the first Disney shorts infiltrated an imagination already seduced by Edward Lear and Spike Milligan's use of the surreal and the absurd. His is a many-layered and enticing vision where sweetness jostles with the macabre, absurdity with gravity.

Yew's Paw, a cycle of 13 solo piano pieces, is a powerful expression of these colliding themes. Stylistically, its roots can be traced equally to Drake's classical training and his influential membership of Cardiacs. With Cardiacs he developed a style of ever-shifting key and time signatures, a twisted technique given a new emotional potency in these pieces. The moods of Yew's Paw shift from bar to bar as if tracing the cuts from scene to scene in a silent movie. It is by turns mesmeric, playful, strident, sombre and uplifting, often within a single piece, with diversions into percussive high dissonance reminiscent of Prokofiev, Hindemith and contemporary jazz.

From the lulling cycles of the title track to the fade out of Ralspark, Drake withholds resolution. With no sense of easy containment, each emotional line is left live and shifting, driving the listener's imagination. But these exotic concoctions are as rewarding as they are demanding. Contemporary composition free of any sense of generic boundary, Yew's Paw's peculiar bounty will delight confirmed fans and woo those yet to be.

Yew's Paw is released on February 5 2007 on Onomatopoeia records.

Briny Hooves
New album release February 5 2007

Briny Hooves is the second solo album by composer, songwriter and one time Cardiacs key man William D Drake. Complex and passionate, Drake's work draws upon psychedelia, madrigals, Jacobean poetry and sea shanties, making him a worthy successor to the line of great English eccentrics. However, while clearly rooted in the same soil as Syd Barrett, Peter Hammill and (distant cousin) Nick Drake, his contemporary counterparts are the American alt heavyweights: Sufjan Stevens, Jon Brion and Mr E. With them he shares the capacity to make seemingly impossible connections. Weaving disparate threads with a sense of playfulness and chordal lushness akin to that of Brian Wilson, his music has a historical span matched only by Dead Can Dance.

More accessible than its predecessor, but no less characteristic or daring, Briny Hooves is a trove of strange delights; hearty and effervescent, melancholic and dreamlike. Never far from the salty grind of his signature harmonium, its songs span the perfect psyche pop of Serendipity Doodah, the Wilson-esque lilt of Ugly Fortress and Melancholy World and the haunting prog lament of January Night. Lyrically enigmatic and Mellotron-ically epic, Seahorse is Briny Hooves at its most seductive, its wordless trumpet-led refrain etched into the memory from first listen.

In Briny Hooves, the inimical Mr Drake has served us not just a rich feast for the senses. This product of his highly individual vision is the rarest of beasts, an album as playful as it is passionate and urgent as it is timeless.

Briny Hooves is released on February 5 2007 on sheBear records (www.shebearrecords.com).