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In 1983 I moved from Atlanta to New York City, choosing to reside in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I noticed right away the pace and noise of the big city created an ambience of high energy and sometimes violent chaos.

To chill out after a tumultuous day on the streets of New York, I found the relaxing sounds of ambient music soothed the frayed nerves. I especially enjoyed the then current albums of Brian Eno's Ambient series, Music for Airports and On Land. Harold Budd and Jon Hassell were other favourites. The West Coast radio program Hearts of Space was another purveyor of this style of music.

Around this same time I purchased a Fostex 4-track cassette deck, which had just been introduced, and offered, for the first time, very affordable multi-tracking capabilities.

I spent many Manhattan nights hunched over my little Fostex, tracking layers of synth pads with delay and signal processing textures, composing my own cassette releases of ambient music. Some of these compositions even received airplay on John Schaffer's renowned syndicated radio program New Sounds.

One of these cassette albums I created was entitled Spear in the Veil, and contained some serious chill out ambient music - the original definition of ambient, before it became an electronica term in the nineties for more drum oriented dance music. The main concept of this album was pure, soothing atmosphere, which I had recorded mainly for my wife Rosa to play for relaxing friends and clients during her shiatsu massage sessions.

In January of 2007 I dug out my master cassette of Spear in the Veil and dubbed it to CD. I hadn't heard it in many years, mainly because cassettes are so foreign in today's digital world of CD's and mp3's. I found the music way too subdued, probably because in the interim, I had returned to laid back Atlanta, and now need more upbeat music to keep the balance.

So I decided to try some drum and bass remixes of Spear in the Veil, feeding the original 1986 mixes into my Mac, and layering some filtered beats on top. I wanted to keep the original recordings fairly untouched, and work quickly, simply giving the ambient eighties synth-strata a bed of rhythm to "get on up with it".

The results are what you hear here - a surprisingly fresh sounding downtempo trance collection, traversing over twenty years and a trip from the streets of lower Manhattan to the 'burbs of Atlanta.