Synth Wizard John Foxx To Release Feted Ambient Trilogy As Vinyl Box Set

Cathedral Oceans is John Foxx's three album ambient epic, widely considered to be a masterpiece of the genre. The musician, who first came to public attention as the synth man in the first incarnation of Ultravox, worked on the trilogy for years, constructing a slow moving, Eno-esque soundscape based on his memories of choral performance as a child. Released between 1997 and 2005, Edsel Records are now releasing a limited deluxe box set that gathers together all three albums for the first time. Spread over 5xLPs and packaged with extensive artwork that includes passages from Foxx's book The Quiet Man (which we're assuming/ hoping isn't a biography of Iain Duncan Smith), there will be 750 copies of The Complete Catherdral Oceans available worldwide. 

“Cathedral Oceans started when I was kid, when I sang in a choir briefly,” Foxx says. “During that time I became very interested in the way that sound worked in big spaces, churches particularly. I learned a lot of things there but I didn’t understand a lot of what I’d actually learned until later. And when I started recording I’d almost forgotten about all that until I started using echoes and reverberations, and then I realised that I could use some of that to simulate things that happened when I was singing in churches back then, and use that old knowledge of how a single voice in a massive space behaves. It really inspired the juxtaposition of old style church music with modern technology and synthesizers creating notional space, rather than real space.”

Watch a trailer below, and pre-order over here.