Thirty-nine years ago on the summer solstice, Ozric Tentacles formed at Stonehenge Free Festival. This year, the band’s mastermind Ed Wynne celebrated with the release of a new single, taken from his latest collaborative project, Tumbling Through The Floativerse. Wynne reveals how the album with Gracerooms’ Gre Vanderloo came about and what’s next for his main band.

Words: Johnny Sharp Images: Andrew Perry

W “ e couldn’t help ourselves!” That’s the explanation Ed Wynne offers when Prog asks how he came to make an album with Dutch multi-instrumentalist Gre Vanderloo, aka Gracerooms. That might sum up the former’s approach to making music, whether as Ozric Tentacles, the band he’s helmed for four decades now, as a solo artist (responsible for 2019’s travel-inspired Shimmer Into Nature), in the guise of electronically oriented Ozrics spin-off Nodens Ictus, or in an upcoming project with Ozrics’ longlost extended family members Eat Static, more of which later.

Vanderloo and Wynne prepare to tumble through a floativerse.

Wynne admits he spends “most of his waking hours” making music, and trifling obstacles such as a global pandemic were never going to stand in his way. In fact, the restrictions and uncertainties of early 2020 only helped facilitate this particular project, even though Wynne and his son – bandmate Silas Neptune – still had to finish Ozrics’ last album Space For The Earth, and he and Vanderloo had only briefly collaborated, with the Dutchman’s synths adorning that album. Vanderloo was a longtime Ozrics fan and it turned out the admiration was mutual.

“He’s one of those people whose musical sphere I’d been quietly impressed with,” says Wynne. “It was nice to find out he’s a very nice guy. I get on well with him and musically we had great fun in the studio.

“Just before the pandemic I’d been to [Gre’s] house in Holland for a visit and we happened to record a couple of backing tracks,” Wynne adds. “I got them back here, he came over to work on a few more tracks, and then Covid hit, and we ended up saying, ‘Well, okay, there’s not much else to do now…’ So we decided we’d just carry on with these tracks [and the work they did pre-pandemic], maybe expand it and see where it goes.”