It’s been more than eleven years since UK-based Solarstone first entered the dance music community’s collective consciousness with the release of their first single, “The Calling”, and nearly a decade since their anthemic “Seven Cities” introduced a generation of clubgoers to radio-friendly melodic trance. Since those heady days, Solarstone has come and gone from the spotlight too many times to count, choosing to write the music that they love, rather than chasing the tastes of the masses. In an industry where so many artists appear to squeeze as many tunes as possible out their narrow window of popularity, Solarstone’s curiously sparse release history and enduring appeal provide an interesting illustration of a road less traveled. On the eve of the release of their first-ever artist album, the eagerly anticipated “Rain Stars Eternal”, Solarstone caught up with Area709’s Matthew Belleghem to talk about just why it is that Solarstone sounds the way they do.

“To be honest, Solarstone has always been about quality, rather than quantity,” Solarstone’s patriarch and sole remaining member Rich Mowatt explains of Solarstone’s unique history. “The music that I make has always been the music that I wanted to hear. I never really took much inspiration from the dance music scene. I always took my inspiration from other areas, other types of music. Because all types are music are constantly mutating and evolving, if you draw your inspiration from those, you can always create something new and exciting.”

For many underground dance acts, a hit like “Seven Cities”, which made the UK Top 40 charts in 1999, would be the catalyst for a rapid-fire series of same-sounding releases, in order to cash in on the hype and popularity of a popular track and recognized name. But for Solarstone, it was business as usual – making the music they loved, regardless of what the commercial climate of the day happened to be. “If you tend to follow your contemporaries, you’re always going to be stuck in this kind of loop where you follow what somebody is doing, and then they sort of give up, and then you follow what somebody else is doing, and then they give up – and to me that’s not what it’s about,” Rich explains. “I’ve always been inspired by people outside of dance music – people like Vangelis and Pet Shop Boys.”

“You do derail, and that’s the joy of it,” he says of his steadfast refusal to bend to the will of mass appeal. “When you insist on quality over quantity and you do miss the mark, you just don’t release the track right then. I’ve recorded a lot of material that’s never come out – or I’ve ended up releasing it under different names, or different styles. I’ve released a whole bunch of house stuff over the last ten years that there’s no way that people would know that I was behind it. It gives you an opportunity to experiment so that you don’t get bored.” To Rich, sometimes it can take years for the right moment to come along for a track to be released – or for the final, missing sample or sound to arrive to complete the record for public consumption. “Solarcoaster was recorded about six months after Seven Cities, in 1998, but didn’t get a release for about four years,” he recalls. “When Ben Lost took over Lost Language he found that track and said he wanted to release it. I always wanted there to be some kind of spoken word sample in the breakdown, but I could never find the right sample to put there. I was round at a friend’s house one day, and we were watching True Romance, and when the film came to the end, I heard those words and I jumped out of my seat.”

However you describe it, most dance music fans familiar with Rich’s work would say that there’s most definitely a “Solarstone sound”, imitated in countless synth patches and tracks (including Aly & Fila’s recent release Lost Language, an homage to Solarstone’s one-time label as well as to their enduring sound) but never quite duplicated by anyone else.

“The reason that there’s a Solarstone sound is probably because I love a particular sound – I love a very pure sound, a gentle sound,” Rich says. “I know that if something can sound beautiful and euphoric at low volume, then it’s going to sound incredibly beautiful, incredibly euphoric at very high volume, like in a club. I also tend to avoid really aggressive, harsh sounds that people put in tracks to make them sound powerful at low volume. I prefer to let the club be my amplifier.”

“Or maybe the reason that Solarstone has its own sound is because of how I compose,” he continues. “I compose everything on the piano. To me, if a melody sounds good just played on the piano, then it will work in almost any kind of production. So what I tend to do is compose my stuff on the piano and then translate it into a modern electronic production.”

To some, much of Solarstone’s sound comes down to guitars and guitar-type timbres, such as those that dominate many of their best-known releases. “I do use guitars,” Rich acknowledges. “There is that sound that I’ve used in tracks like Seven Cities and Solarcoaster, and on the new track on the album called Forever. When I did Seven Cities, I wanted to create a theme that was based on that echo-ey guitar sound that would sound amazing in a club – and so I started with Seven Cities, and then Solarcoaster, now the new one - and what I tend to do is I’ll do make what I’d consider a traditional Solarstone track, and then something new, and then another traditional Solarstone track. It keeps the traditional fans happy but it also allows me to experiment with different sounds.”

Rich admits that he’s seen many try to copy it. “There are a few different soft synths out there that have patches called ‘Seven Cities’ which is quite funny, because they don’t sound anything like it!”

And now the question that so many bedroom producers have been dying to pop - just what is that sound, then? “You wouldn’t believe how many producers ask me that,” Rich says of Solarstone’s most familiar synth patch – the glistening, FM-like synthetic guitar around which the melodic hooks of Seven Cities, Solarcoaster and Forever are built. “There’s no way I’m going to tell you too much of the specifics,” he says with a laugh, “but it’s based around two pieces of hardware that I combined in the studio, pretty much by accident.”

But for as much as Solarstone has been a household name among fans of melodic dance music, they have never before released an artist album, instead having been known primarily for their remixes and single releases. “I always wanted to make a full-length artist album,” Rich acknowledges. “When Andy and I first started working together, we were following the same path, but as the years progressed our musical tastes changed and we started following different paths. When we got to the stage that I wanted to make an album, we agreed on that little, that recording a full-length album would be an impossible task. It was only when we went our separate ways a few years ago that I was free to create the album I’ve always wanted to create.” It’s been a long time coming. “The oldest track on there, some of those musical themes I’ve been playing around since I was 18 or 19 years old,” he notes.

But for Rich, the wait has been well worth it. “The tracks on it have been written over a very, very long period of time,” he says wistfully. “It was definitely a labour of love.”