Velvet Blue Music proudly announces Holiday Fable, an album of original Christmas songs by Ronnie Martin. Martin’s long-running cult electronic pop band Joy Electric released 14 albums and cultivated a worldwide fanbase before he finally shelved the project in 2013. Martin returned in early 2022 with the triumphant, From the Womb of the Morning… LP, and quickly followed it up later in the year with Bells Merrily, his first release of original Christmas tunes. A year later, Martin has returned yet again with a new album of future holiday favorites. Whereas Bells Merrily saw Martin deliver a largely downbeat, more ethereal selection of yuletide carols, the new one offers listeners a speedy, rousing sleigh ride through the Swiss alps. 

 

Holiday Fable follows in the grand tradition of Martin's vast but essentially unvaried back catalogue: Nostalgia dripped, catchy-as-a-cold pop melodies blanketed by layers of intricate Moog synthesizers, creating a switched-on dreamworld that Jean Jacques Perrey, Logans Run, and The Human League declared would someday be our future. Martin’s lush vocalizing adds some necessary warmth to the dizzying array of twinkling sequences, with the overall effect generating a new set of timeless Christmas tracks that sound like they've been part of the holiday canon for years. Martin creates a curious and original juxtaposition on Holiday Fable: by combining the songwriting chops of Burt Bacharach and Mel Torme with the future sounds of yesteryear, we get a hint of what Christmas may have once sounded like, but still can as long as futurists like Martin keep creating these welcome worlds for us to step into.

Also . . . we are working on Small Sounds Press Issue 2 right now ! If you haven't got issue 1 yet, please do !