When we performed Songs for Gaia during the Brighton Festival in 2006 (brilliant gig! you should've been there!) we put together a first half consisting of what we called Brian's other stuff, to make a full evening of poetry and music. When I say "we", I mean apart from myself, the amazing jazz and blues singer, Claudia van Buren and the inspired virtuoso flautist Paul Cheneour who is at home in many styles including jazz, classical and Middle Eastern. I consider myself really fortunate working with two such experienced professionals.

Claudia had set a couple of my poems as songs, Travellin' as a Delta blues giving it a new dimension quite different from the way I read it; and Resurrection as a vocal solo that just rips me up every time I hear her sing it.

I'd performed many of the pieces with Paul before, his flute lines weaving around my voice. Paul's music is spontaneous composition rather than improvisation as the jazzistas would know it and every time we perform the poems the music is different. In a way it's strange to have it fixed now on a recording ...

So we went into a recording studio and put the pieces down. Then took the result away and mixed and put the album together with Pete Townsend (using a program called Sadie). Some of the poems are really more like very short radio plays - Khamsin with the background of the wind and the sound of Paul playing the ney (a middle eastern flute used in Sufi music) and the poem set over that. Then Elegy which Claudia reads like an announcement against a background of airport noise and I'll leave you the listener to work out what it's about. Also we give the short haiku-like piece Senryu a touch of rap (just a touch).

Then there are the pieces where the flute counterpoints and punctuates the words: Paul playing sleazy on Poem (yes, I know, a stunningly original title), loose limbed on Tohu & Bohu (with a nod to Cole Porter), atonal on Prelude to the Obsidian Mirror, and then accompanies the title track Village of Stones with his own idiosyncratic way of playing guitar.

There are also a couple of purely musical pieces, Cantilena where Paul plays alto-flute and I play a drone pattern on the tamboura, and Butterfly, a song of Claudia's with Paul on flute and me on tamboura (with occasional tings on the tingsha, a Tibetan cymbal).

The purely spoken word pieces complete the album. All of them are also available in the book Village of Stones apart from the long piece Ocean Diary which will be published later.