THE CROSSBREED is an accidental musical cross-fertilisation.

The coming together of musicians, 'Dogman' (David Sands), a singer songwriter based in Lancashire, and Mikans (Matt Baker) originally based in Japan, was written in the stars.

‘Mikans’ is a Japanese word for oranges (without the plural). Dogman is so-called because of his day job as an animal behaviour specialist. Dogman heard a wonderful instrumental composition by Mikans on MySpace called ‘SpaceFall’ and decided that it would ‘paint’ a superb opener for his lyrical poem, ‘Signal to Mars - The Eerie silence’. The poem forms a message to Professor Paul Davies Chair of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) More about this project another time.

Within a month, there were many exchanges of song ideas and at the same time in 2010 Dogman was studio recording for ‘The Whisperer’, his first album for nearly 10 years in a Nelson with Mr Smith of Audiofile. One of the early Dogman tracks ‘Home Fire’ (featuring Mikans on Rhodes) was first played by Tom Robinson on his BBC6 Music radio program ‘Introducing unsigned on the net’. Neither Mikans or Dogman could have imagined that great moment when they first began exchanging music.

With The Whisperer album completed such was the interchange excitement between them that Dogman shared a number of unfinished demos of new songs and older tracks from his two earlier albums, ‘The Emotional Jukebox’ (2000) and ‘Keep the blood running’ (2001) for re-mixing and extending. ‘Heaven’, on both albums, did not capture the happiness that Mikans brilliantly achieved in his 2010 re-mix. Matt played Rhodes and re-mixed the original track to include in the sound of Japanese children playing.

Dogman’s first self penned acoustic song (written in 1971), ‘See me through’ has now become a dance tune! ‘Like an Inca’ (from Keep the blood running) is an epic tribute to Neil Young. This new 2010 re-mix track still includes the guitar skills of talented Jazz-Americana musician, Matt Wells as it was played in 2001.

Mikans eventually returned to England and he and Dogman met and talked about the future. Since that time a number of new tracks have been developed. These will be uploaded to Soundcloud eventually.