The new album from Van der Graaf Generator will be released on 14th March 2011 and is entitled: A Grounding in Numbers". The Grounding page also includes an interview with Peter Hammill.
PH also did an interview for the Barbican website.
You can read about the making of the album on SofaSound and hear clips here.
In late 2008 and early 2009 preparations began for the next set of recordings. Song fragments were gathered, ideas exchanged, theories, policies and directions discussed. In April 2010 the band met up for intensive tracking sessions in Cornwall, arranging, rehearsing and recording the album in a week. Some of the pieces were already fully-formed songs; others, even at this stage, remained more sketches than fully realised works.
Over the next months the tracks were overdubbed, edited and adapted by the band in their own studios. A constant exchange of files over the internet or on CDR kept the project in full alignment. By September the project was ready to be mixed. Hugh Padgham had agreed to take on this part of the process - the first time anyone outside the band had been entrusted such responsibility. After three weeks in Hugh's London studio, Sofasound (which shares its name with Peter's original home set-up), "A Grounding in Numbers" was completed. With a fantastic clarity and depth of sound and a helter-skelter stretch of tunes, "A Grounding..." sees VdGG pushing ever further forward into the twentieth century. Clearly, they know they're a group with a certain history - but they are also an emphatically modern one.
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