Shortly below Christmas – and to mark the Winter Solstice – ‘Waiting Space’ (the audio & visual solo project of Waterford’s Chris Falconer) made the demo version (or what the artist calls a ‘Púca Version’) of his piece ‘Winter Sun’ from 2021, available across streaming services for the first time (having only been on Bandcamp and YouTube up until now).
This alternate version is a scaled back, neo-classical interpretation of the song – in contrast to the more expansive, synth-led ‘normal’ version of ‘Winter Sun’ (a great live version of which, can be seen on YouTube at https://youtu.be/EwiMyKKSsmc?si=rUAAk5pt9W3X9ajy).
‘Púca’ is both the Irish for ghost, and what the icon in Waiting Space’s logo is called). Explaining this further, Chris notes that ‘I think that ethereal notion of a ghost / spirit, is a good way of describing those demo / alternate versions of songs that are at the ‘in-between’ phase, but come to have their own presence. While they aren’t necessarily the final version – often artists live with certain demos of a song for a long time before a more rounded ‘final’ version is shared to an audience – and a connection can form with the song in that more scaled-back demo state, in the interim.
In this case, ‘Winter Sun (Púca Version)’ was a demo I lived / listened back to for a number of months – not entirely sure that it was the overall destination I wanted to get to with the song, but it also felt like a beautiful thing in its honest sparseness. Whereas the ‘main’ version of Winter Sun would go on to grow into a much more heavily produced, and synth driven piece – the demo captured in the ‘Púca Version’, was a much ‘simpler’ piano-led, neo-classical piece, with very honest scratch vocals that I recorded as placeholders (I still hadn’t written half of the lyrics at that point) – and I had added in small layers of strings that acted as a glue to these gentle elements.
‘Winter Sun’ began in a very literal dark time, in the depths of the winter months between the end of 2020, and beginning of 2021 – when Ireland was back into strict lockdown procedures; and I, like most people, were finding it hard to be in a loop where you would spend the day at home, remote working, and then by the time you would be finished, it would be dark outside. But, in trying to keep myself present, I found joys in little things like the cast shadows that would lie across my floors, when the sun would be strong enough to break through the lines in the curtains/blinds (the cover artwork is a photo of the moment that inspired that). Things like these keep/kept me going…’