deep sky divers

Since the early 1990's, deep sky divers have been producing evocative and inspirational instrumental music. This remained secret music until made available initially on mp3.com in 2000. The success of these initial releases inspired divers jon short and david jones to work on new music. Their 2002 release HIGHLANDS & SKYLANDS was hailed as one of the best new age releases of the year and 2003's THE NEW FAST LANE was described as "even closer to perfection"...

Jon Short and David Jones became sound friends in their hometown of Sheffield in the early 80's. They played in bands together for a while before going their separate ways again - David into relative musical obscurity and Jon into an on-off career as a professional bassist/cellist that at its height has seen him perform / record with PULP and NEIL FINN.

The early 1990's found David and Jon working and commuting full-time, starting families etc... But in the odd spare hour or two that life afforded them, they created music. Ignoring the demands and restrictions of the marketplace and any lingering music biz ambitions or goals, they created the music of their dreams. Music inspired by life experience, by landscape and their interaction with it. For them, music was simply an escape from the rigours of daily life - and they found they were able to write music to escape by...

When this secret music was first made available on mp3.com under the name of DEEP SKY DIVERS, the positive response was a revelation. The debut cd NATURAL POWER was released in april 2000 and quickly became the #1 selling cd by a UK artist on mp3.com. MOMENTUM followed in 2001 and HIGHLANDS & SKYLANDS in 2002 - the latter making #17 in the New Age Voice Worldwide Radio Playlist, being selected as the #1 Instrumental Music release of 2002 by Backroads Music and being described as "one of the best releases of this year" by Wind & Wire.

All this amounted to something of a life-changing experience for David and Jon. They chose to go with the flow; to give up the day jobs (and the commuting) and to devote their lives to producing and promoting DEEP SKY DIVERS music. New cd, THE NEW FAST LANE, is released in may 2003 and is their most chilled-out collection to date containing new tracks and reworked chilled-down versions of earlier material.

I have played thousands of gigs - but only a handful as deep sky divers. It's hard work reproducing the music live and it's hard to find the right setting. But I intend to keep going with it...

Varied influences - mainly English prog-rock (Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, peter Gabriel etc...) and 20th century English "classical" music (Britten, Vaughan Williams, Finzi etc...). Massive recent influence - Kit Watkins...

Lots of primarily Korg synthesisers, piano, bass guitars, a cello, some whistles and the odd guitarist. I still do all midi programming using cubase on atari and record all audio on an Akai DPS16 digital multitrack. I master on PC using Cool Edit Pro and T-RackS24...