A special new and very atmospheric EP is coming, titled: ‘Samos Sessions & Golden Verses’.
It is centered around songs about, and containing, ancient teachings by the Pythagorians.
Featuring recordings made on the island of Samos – Greece, in a chapel, in a cave, with additional recording in the studio, it runs a total of 25 minutes in 3 songs.

A 16+ minute trance-folk rendition of the Golden Verses was originally planned to be included on the forthcoming CD release ‘Rise In Love’. But it felt better at home in a stand-alone environment with other songs relating to the topic of timeless philosophy.

The EP will be streaming on all platforms in mid March and will be available on CD on March 19 ’24.
Downloads via Bandcamp will be up too: https://advanderveen.bandcamp.com

Notes on Samos Sessions & Golden Verses:

As we probably all have experienced, sometimes there is a sense of being overcome by a miraculous familiarity, with a person or a place, that for some reason draws you in.
The island of Samos, Greece is a home-away-from-home for us since visiting there for the first time in 2008 at the invitation from a musician-friend who got to know my songs and played them there. 
There was an inexplicable pull that kept us returning there again and again in the years that followed, like a notion of some long lost memory of home. 

Through those years I came to learn more and more about the island’s most revered historic figure Pythagoras, the great master philosopher, mystic, mathematician, musician, astrologer and many more titles that he may be given. 
It fascinated me to find out that he was so much more than the mathematician he is mostly remembered as, a key figure in ancient philosophy that has shaped western thinking and civilization, strongly influencing Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the early Stoics, Jesus Christ, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and many who came after. 

As I read more and more, I felt inspired to write, and intrigued to visit the place where he lived and taught – a cave high up in mount Kerkis – and despite my fear of heights I felt compelled to even record a song (Song From Pythagoras’ Cave) up there. 
Another recording scene was set in a chapel on a hill that had the right ambience for a song (Believe) I had written on the subject of ancient wisdom that was passed on down the line from Samos.

The culmination, however, was later when I came upon the Golden Verses – Pythagoras’ teachings summarized by his followers in 71 verses, which tallied with the Eastern philosophy that I was familiar with, and rang like timeless truth and lofty goals to try and live by.
For probably the same inexplicable reason as all our visits, I felt the urge to try and set these words to music in an improvised manner that would leave the text free and center-stage. 

The Golden Verses can be broken down into two parts: 1-47 for practical guidelines and 48-71 for spiritual guidelines. 
This outline was roughly followed in the rendition that became the recording, with only a shift in part 2 from a minor to a major chord, keeping a hypnotic cadence going.

Sometimes the verses need clarification of words and expressions whose meanings have changed through time and translation. 
As an example: the frequently used word ‘Daemon’ here denotes divine intermediate, while the English translation came to be associated with something diabolic. 
For more context on this and a transcript of the verses themselves I would like to refer to the Harvard university documents found here: https://people.math.harvard.edu/~knill/various/eterosego/pythagoras_verses.pdf