REGENERATOR
Frustration often fuels creativity and that’s where the origin story of Layne Loxley’s Regenerator begins.
Loxley, a Dayton-based multi-instrumentalist, was playing keyboards for local metal band Sacred Society in 2005 when aggravation spurred him to begin recording his own original material.
“The whole idea of joining Sacred Society was we were going to go in the studio and do an album,” he said. “We’d been together for six months and hadn’t planned any studio time or gotten a manager. Musically I was happy with it, but the group wasn’t moving forward. We were just playing some live gigs locally and that’s when I decided to record my own songs.”
Human Paradox guitarist Darin Moore also was in Sacred Society and also was itching to get in the studio. Loxley immediately recruited Moore to help him realize his vision.
“I knew Darin was a great player,” Loxley said. “He hadn’t recorded since the previous Legacy CD in 2003 so he was ready to record as well. It was good opportunity for us to work together in the studio, which we never got to do in Sacred Society.”
The results of the collaboration, dubbed Layne Loxley’s Regenerator, is refined progressive rock with equal parts metal, classical music and jazz.
“I’ve always wanted to do something in this style that’s more baroque,” Loxley said. “There’s a little Bach influence, like in early Genesis albums, which I always liked. I like that keyboard style and I’ve never been in a band that had that going on so that’s what I wanted to do.”
This summer Regenerator released its debut CD, a five-song E.P. recorded at Refraze Studio between September 2005 and February 2008. Of course, recording prog-rock material takes time. It’s not like banging out a garage rock album over a weekend, especially when it’s mainly two guys with a rotating cast of bassists handling the bulk of the intricately layered multipart songs with an average length of five minutes.
“We’ve been working on this off and on because of my work schedule,” Loxley said. “We’d work on the weekends and weeknights, a Saturday here and a Tuesday night there. It’s been a long period of time for a small amount of material, but we also weren’t rushed. It was a slow process, but the results were good,” he added.
“I’m happy with the way it turned out, but I never would’ve been able to complete it without help from a lot of people along the way.”
Artist info: www.my space.com/layneloxleys regenerator.
About the Author