Erasmus was formed in April 2001.  It came to fruition after a chance meeting between Matthew Cohen (bass) and Jayde (Guitar/Vocals) in a studio in South Wales.  Jayde was an engineer working in the studio and Matthew went down to do some session work for an artist recording there.  They got talking and realised that their taste in music crossed many of the same boundaries.  Both guys come from the progressive rock side of music, (Matthew used to be in a progressive rock band called Unbroken Spirit back in 1995-1997 that got some good press coverage).  So the scene was set for both guys to start work.

Matthew and Jayde set to work writing and recording in Jayde’s home studio and quickly ideas formed, which turned to tunes, which turned into songs. They took a demo of 4 songs to a forward thinking record label called F2 Records and they seemed interested in what the guys were doing. They asked them to write some more tunes and come back to them when they were done.  By the end of July they had an album worth of material. They went back to F2 Records with the completed album and a deal was offered to them.

In September 2001, Matthew and Jayde entered the studio to start laying down the tracks for the album, playing modern progressive rock music with all the dynamics of the classic bands, but also incorporating the heaviness and crunching sound of the modern day rock acts.

The album, called “Voyage”, was released during 2002 and co-written and arranged by Jayde and Matthew on all tracks except Silent Dreams and The End Of Time. Those two tracks were written by Jayde as were all the lyrics. Rob Reed (of Magenta) produced the CD and also had a major part in the final arrangement of the songs, which really shows in the final result. Rob actually plays on the album too. Jayde had come up with some of the keyboard parts initially, but when it actually came down to recording, it was decided that because of Rob's wealth of knowledge, experience and skill, it was best left to Rob to record all the keyboards, along with arranging the orchestration on the album.