Last summer Alex Lifeson made a guest appearance on German drummer, composer and multi-instrumentalist Marco Minnemann's album BORREGO, playing on 3 tracks, including one which he co-wrote with Minnemann - On That Note. Here's Minnemann discussing Lifeson's contribution to the album and how it came about in a Rolling Stone interview from last September:

I knew Alex already from a few years ago... But I never communicated with him before. The record company that released Borrego-one of the guys is a huge fan of Alex-he asked him if would like to play on this album... Alex wrote back and said, "Oh yes I would really like to." So I was like, "Fuck yes!" I'm a huge fan of his work and Rush is such a great band. What happened next was very interesting... When Joe sent in his guitar tracks, there were really accurate files, maybe just one or two files you would import them into your software and it would already sync up great, the guitar solo was done, everything was perfect. And Alex was perfect too, but he worked completely differently. He sent me instead of one or two files, 13 or 14 files per song and made entire guitar arrangements... It was so rich. You couldtell the difference of Joe being also a session player and Alex being mainly Rush; he doesn't do that many collaborations. So he kind of presented-which I was very proud of and feel very happy about-he kind of worked with me as if he were in Rush. He would offer all these ideas, and it was so rich and beautiful that I took one part... And made a completely new song out of it, and then I played it to Alex. And he was like "Oh this is cool, can I do some more to it?" All of a sudden we started writing a song together, so that's how that happened. It was a very beautiful and very musical experience. [The song is] "On That Note," you'll hear that it has some of these guitar tones he came up with... It sounded so beautiful, it's very haunting, very dark and weird, and I played it back to him after I mixed it and he wrote back saying, "Wow it sounds so scary!" And I just said, "Look I know all of your albums with Rush, including your solo album Victor [1996], and I never heard you make sounds like that!" And he was very delighted about it. When you listen to that song you hear some parts that sound like Rush, so you can hear his imprint. But some stuff is -which made me especially happy- unusual where I thought, "Wow I haven't even heard him doing that with his band."

Minnemann and Lifeson had such a good experience that they began working on a follow-up collaboration earlier this year as outlined in this post from Minnemann's Facebook page back in January:

Sunset view from my music studio, while working on a new song together with ALEX LIFESON. This production also features MOHINI DEY on bass and ADI ARGELAZI on vocals. More about this adventure in a little while. We're working on it..... and it's coming together quite nicely I think. - MM

Minnemann finally posted an update on the project to his Facebook page earlier today (thanks John at Cygnus-X1.net). Although it too was lacking in details, it did include some cool artwork:

Working on a new collaborative release together with Rush's Alex Lifeson. Watch this space for more details to follow soon.
(Artwork by Tom Colbie)

If your curious about bass player Mohini Dey and vocalist Adi Argelazi, you can check out their respective Facebook pages here and here. Here's a one-minute clip of Lifeson and Minnemann's On That Note from BORREGO.