THE INTRO
Keyboardist Jordan Rudess says he never gave up hope of LTE3 being made, even after Mike Portnoy’s split with Dream Theater left issues that needed to be resolved.
We announce the return of instrumental supergroup Liquid Tension Experiment, plus the very latest news from Cosmograf, Richard Barbieri, BTBAM, Wheel, Tusmørke, Robert Berry, Möbius Strip and more...
More than two decades after their last studio album, instrumental powerhouse Liquid Tension Experiment are poised to release their long-awaited third record, LTE3, on March 26 via InsideOut. “[There was] a 22-year gap where not a day went by where somebody didn’t message me and say, ‘When is the next LTE? I really want the next LTE!’” says keyboardist Jordan Rudess.
Prospects for new material from Rudess, Mike Portnoy, John Petrucci and Tony Levin were widely assumed to have been scuppered after Portnoy’s split from Dream Theater in 2010.
But Rudess says he never gave up hope, and there was steady chatter among the four about getting back together.
“Mike and I kept communication through all this time, even when things were a little bit rocky,” he says. “Like the weather, the clouds go away, and the sun comes out eventually. Things change; relationships mend and heal.” The buzz around a possible reunion intensified when Portnoy and Rudess played together on Yes’ Cruise To The Edge, and was ramped up further when Portnoy drummed on Petrucci’s Terminal Velocity album last year.
“I was really excited when John told me he was going to work with Mike on that album,” Rudess says. “I was like, ‘Finally!’ Everybody has their own dynamics between each other, and I think there was a big opening recently in that relationship, where they could work together and felt it was going to be comfortable on all levels.”
The four players reassembled last July, for the first time in over two decades, in Dream Theater’s Yonderbarn headquarters. “Quite honestly, I’ve been a big proponent of doing this whenever it was possible,” the keyboardist says.“Then one of the things that really made this happen was, all of a sudden, we’re all home and we have time. ‘Guys, let’s do this!’” It was the first time he’d been in a recording space with Levin since LTE2 in 1999. “We walked into the studio and it was literally like no time had passed. It’s crazy to think about that, because 22 years is a long time,” he says. “I worked with Tony a little bit on the Levin Minnemann Rudess project but he was in his studio, I was in my studio – we never got together. So, 22 years later we’re there and we’re just working like it’s the next day.”
All the material on LTE3 is brand new, with the sole exception of Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue, which they used to play live.
“It was a big healing for us to be all together and working”
“We do these things pretty quick – we’re in the studio for two, three weeks,” says Rudess. He’d arrived at the sessions with a folder full of ideas, just in case the years apart had dulled their chemistry. But he needn’t have worried: “Of course, what happens is there’s so much excitement, so much inspiration, so much energy between the players that a lot of things happened in the moment.”
LTE3 will be released with an extra disc containing raw material from the writing sessions. “It features a lot of the pure improvisations that we did, so that’s really fun,” says Rudess, for whom the whole process has been emotionally and creatively restorative.
“It was almost like this big exhale for all of us. It was a big healing for us to be all together and working.”
See www.facebook.com/ltexperiment for more information. DW