Liner notes by Jan Akkerman:
"Your imagination can take you anywhere at any time, and transcend al illusions of time and space".

I just finalized my new project calles "Close Beauty", which took med well over a year to complete. The title was inspired from a simple notion, that when you are too close to an object you cannot see the real value. The same applies to music.

While browsing the internet, I came across a blog on modern painters. To my surprise it featured many American, French, Italian and Russians artists. They uses gorgeous woman as subject for their visual art (there are worse subjects to think of, right?). Like most things by Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh and Rembrandt, I find thrm pleasing on the eyes and soul. I'm fascinated by the technical perfection in impressionism, absurdism and realism. The painting by Michael Cheval on the album cover had all the qualities I was loking for. It conveys the musical content of the album and "it keeps the flow in the show, without words", so to speak.

I shared the idea of using Michael's painting with Coen Molenaar, producer and keyboardist on "Close Beauty". He agreed that the images fitted my music perfectly. Michael's art deserves to be shared and exposed to a bigger audience.

The stor of "Close Beauty" began with a concert. Each year, Dutch music rights protection organization SENA organizes the "European Guitar Award", an award show and concert to honor one truly exceptional guitar player. Previous winners of this prestigious award include Steve Lukather, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Brian May and Joe Bonamassa. All the stops were pulled out to make the recipient feel at home. I was honoured to receive the award too, and I'm proud to join all the aforementioned greats.

In 2018 I had dinner with European Guitar Award winner Joe Bonamassa, CEO of Mascot Label Group Ed van Zijl, and Jean Paul Heck, the otrganizer of the European Guitar Award show and owner of Soundz Magazine. Ed and I aldready spoke about working together 10 years earlier. It was during that dinner with Joe and Jean Paul that we came up with a plan that resulted in "Close Beauty", our first project for Mascot Label Group / Music Theories Recordings.

During the "Knight Of The Guitar" tour, guitarist and friend Ruben Hoeke was working in a remote studio near my hometown and offered me to use it. I called in the band and we started working on some songs. The athmosphere in the studio felt great, and we eventually recorded all the songs there.When you listen to the album, you can feel thet most of the songs were done in a live setting.

Marten Haak, the owner of the studio, was responsible for engineering and mixing, together with Coen Molenaar, Peter Bas and myself.

I'm proud of the album you're holding in your hands right now. It gave me the responsibility and excitement to be creative. In the end it's up to The Divine and The Listener to enjoy the Musicke.

Enjoy,
Jan Akkerman