Glide is the experimental, ambient-psychedelic side project from
Echo & the Bunnymen guitarist
Will Sergeant. His solo work dates all the way back to 1978, before the formation of
the Bunnymen, with a cassette-only release limited to seven copies called Weird As Fish (which was literally rediscovered in a studio at the beginning of the 2000s).
Sergeant also released the soundtrack album Themes for Grind in 1982, which, like the rare pre-
Bunnymen album, sounds very much akin to the work of
Bowie/
Eno and other German ambient innovators such as
Cluster.
Adopting the
Glide moniker in 1997 with the release of Space Age Freak Out,
Sergeant's solo work in the '90s and 2000s pretty much picks up where he left off in the early 80s; expansive, psychedelic instrumentals based around floating keyboard and electronic sounds. Performance, a live album featuring the 30-minute computer-composed "Frozen Teardrop in Space," appeared in 1999 on Ochre Records (who released all of the
Glide albums and singles, and reissued Themes for Grind). The early 2000s saw
Sergeant performing a series of shows as
Glide, sometimes as an opening act for
the Bunnymen, and the appearance of a positively trippy band website found at www.glide.cwc.net. ~ Aaron Warshaw