Sometimes the most straightforward things don't turn out the way you expect them to. As the preparation was taking place for the return of our master tapes from France, I had been planning the release of Of The Sun + Moon on CD. The process seemed simple enough: get the master tapes, transfer them into a digital format, and create the CD. However, as I have found repeatedly with Sacred Blade, there is no simple plan. If you have survived the numerous stories contained in this and the previous Commandscript, you may have noted that the distance between any two points on our first album was a very twisted path. The road to the release of the Limited Edition CD was no less uneventful.

My first attempt at the release was in 1993. While our master tapes were on route back from Black Dragon Records, I was busy gathering the elements for the CD jacket. As I was now working with computers, I had a lot more control over the artwork for the packaging than I had for the vinyl incarnation of the album. Taking care of the original cover elements wasn't too much of a challenge, other than finding them after two previous moves. The tough part was coming up with suitable photographs of the band from that era. There have been a limited number of decent band photos at the best of times, and I managed to send off the original prints of most of the good photos to magazines over the years, while the photographers with the negatives disappeared all over the continent. After scouring through several hundred reject photos, I managed to find a few that were useable, though a couple needed serious digital restoration. I proceeded with the cover design, which consisted of a quad fold insert with a full colour rendition of the LP cover on one side, and a two colour reverse side containing the lyrics and black and white photos. I had the covers printed and serial numbered, all set for the impending CD release.

When the tapes finally arrived, I took them to the studio we had been recording at, and transferred the tape contents to digital audio tape. It was very evident that the tapes were in rough shape, and would need a fair amount of work to reequalise them and remove excessive noise. While I was still deciding on a proper course of action a number of events occured that caused a couple of years to pass. Fast forward to 1995. With some new 16 bit digital gear at my disposal I set out once again to restore the recordings. Collecting a group of digital processing equipment that, in theory at least, were supposed to allow me to process my tapes and get them ready for CD release. Deciding to get ahead of myself, I announced the impending release of the CD and began taking preorders for it. After actually working on the tapes I discovered that the gear wasn't quite up to the challenge I was expecting it to address, and the release got delayed. Things happened and another couple of years disappeared.

By 1998 I had most of the gear assembled to again try the restoration process. Utilizing new 24 bit processors work got underway. I already had six or seven demo masters of the CD, and was concentrating on fine tuning several elements. There was still a problem though, and that was the noise level - these were 12 year old analog tapes after all. In order to achieve a proper equalisation curve (to restore the deteriorating signal on tape), I needed to add more high end, which in turn added more hiss. After attempting to rid myself of the noise with various software solutions, I finally brought a Cedar restoration rack into the studio. With this equipment I was able to decrease the noise level significantly without creating a bunch of unwanted side effects. Further refining, and by the end of 1998 I had an acceptable master CD (number 17 I believe).

After field testing the master CD for several months, I was again ready to package the disc. Going back over my 1983 covers, Ted managed to point out that they were missing lyrics (it is called proofreading...), and with various other minor things about it nagging at me, I decided I should redesign the covers again. Still facing the problem of no decent photos, I managed to restore the ones included in the disc, and this time included a complete full color insert, with a double sided colour inlay card. I also managed, through the miracle of digital technology, to fix a problem with the cover artwork that made it to the LP jackets. In April 1999 I printed up another 2000 serial numbered sleeves - twice (after rejecting the first batch), with much more enhanced artwork than I had previously.

After so much time has passed since this disc was first annouced, I know many of you will take a new release announcement with some well deserved scepticism. Despite my good intentions in the past, the contents of this CD are much more than I had thought possible when I started. To make a long story short (that would be a first), the final CD had both the quality of its musical content and packaging upgraded from its original design. We now are able to offer a 24 bit remaster with full colour inserts. I hope you can understand now why this took so long, and hope you feel it was worth the wait.