Martin Lloyd Howard's "Selene" is moonlight in motion!

"Selene" - A quiet masterclass in restraint, resonance, and emotional clarity.

Martin Lloyd Howard is a guitarist and composer from the UK with deep roots in the classical tradition, yet an inquisitive approach to his chosen art form. His music style is a combination of folk, blues, and rock styles in one single entity that makes his own music compositions come out very natural and authentic in texture. Lloyd Howard plays his music using his specially crafted classical guitar that is more than fifty years old. He is equally at home with electric, steel-string acoustic, and slide guitars, as well as other instruments, and is also collaborating with a variety of artists, including Mark Johnson, also known as Midnight River Crew.

“Selene” can convey so well the quiet watchfulness of night itself, shimmering, present, and ever so distant.

It is scored for G minor, with an atypical harmony that sounds wonderfully sparse yet frail at the same time. Howard has an unscriped manner with his phrasing; chords advance more in drifts than progression, pausing in thought ere arriving at full expression. He superimposes a web of melodic lines more delicate than intricate on top of deep-toned bass notes that evoke the drifting passage of clouds across an infra-blue sky. What impresses most is that nothing ever rushes in or becomes too much, so that emotions throng close beneath its surface. Occasional bursts of light prickle through this minor-colored topography, foreshadowing loving feelings that temper at the same time its night-like ambience. “Selene,” in its finish, is poised in such a way that it places its hearer in quiet watchfulness, open to every shadow change beneath moonlight. In its final moments, the music thins to a bright silence, like the moon matted by clouds shifted by wind. The final chords hover between resolution and devastation in a manner that propels one into introspection rather than providing answers.