"Black Swan" was the first composition that Pete Clark recorded for the Glasshouse project. The origins of this track date back to 1991 and a demo he recorded on a Fostex 4 track cassette machine. The 4 track died not long after and the only 2 track mix got chewed up in a cassette tape disaster, familiar to those who have worked with the medium. Pete carried this music around in his head for many years until Glasshouse came in to being and he needed to make a demo recording to showcase the sound palette he wanted to use. When he recorded the original demo, he owned a set of Moog Taurus Bass Pedals (Mk1). He had wanted to play this instrument ever since hearing the opening of "Xanadu" by Rush and he was lucky enough to buy a set from Mark Hawkins the bass player of "Solstice". Pete was an avid fan of the band and saw them many times at The Marquee (Steven Wilson was probably at these gigs too). The Taurus sound is featured in so many classic prog tracks and was a must for the sound palette Pete had in mind. Unfortunately he had sold them to buy an Atari 1040ST and a tent. The Atari is long dead but the tent is still going strong, more on that later. Another must was a Mellotron but he didn't have one of those either so he had to make do with similar sounds from his EMU-Proteus 2000. At the time of the original demo and again when he was playing with Cygnus Flare, Pete was going through a fretless bass phase. Fretless bass is not often heard in progressive rock but Camel used it to great effect in their later recordings. "Black Swan" is a sort of tribute to Camel's "Snow Goose" and Pete had in mind a composition that was just as big. The guitar intro to the track is much more recent. Pete had written some of it to accompany one of his wife Fran's songs when they performed as an acoustic duo. With a few additional chords it formed the perfect intro to the piece he had written back in 1991. So after recreating the original demo from memory and tacking on the new intro, Pete sent it to Arman Vardanyan, hoping that together they could develop it into a much longer piece. As Arman had become increasingly busy with his band Cygnus Flare, this never happened. The track didn't get worked on again until 2017. In August 2017 Pete was recommended as a session bass player to producer Tony Lowe who was in the process of composing a follow up to the 2015 release "Invisible Din", the debut album of his ESP Project. He was planning some live shows to promote the new album, scheduled for release in 2018. Later that month Pete set off for Snowdonia on a camping trip with his youngest son Miles, equipped with the aforementioned tent and a copy of "Invisible Din" to listen to in preparation for a possible get together with ESP later in the year. The campsite Pete found in Snowdonia was situated next to a fast flowing river and the sound it made was so amazing that Pete had to capture it for the intro of "Black Swan", as it had all the qualities he had imagined to go with the guitar intro. When he returned home Pete mixed in the sound of the river and decided that for now the track was complete unless Arman contacted him again. From that time until the pandemic enforced break, Pete was very busy recording and performing with The ESP Project, Progfathers and What The Floyd, so the track remained unreleased until he published it on YouTube in May 2020.