A remix I made for Leonardo Rosado’s EP ‘Fragments of an absent summer’. Sine-waves, guitars, feedback and processed noise layered on top of a re-cut version of the original track.
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The complete EP can be downloaded here.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to join Ed Hamilton and Mendel Kaelen in a studio space where we played quite a long Improv session, hoping that the grouping of our respective approaches would lead to interesting and unexpected results. I started working within this kind of improvisational framework last summer when I prepared for my performance at the Railway in Winchester, and since then, I’ve found the process immensely rewarding – quite unexpectedly, it’s slowly shaped important changes in the way I now approach the compositional process.
For this first workshop, we set up our machines, computers and instruments and agreed to not discuss anything related to music either before or after the session, maybe to keep it free from any preconceived intentions and allow sound to exist in its own space. As far as I remember, we played for 3 hours and, as I expected, we explored very strange territories, something that none of us would have come up with on their own. Upon listening back to the recording, I was very surprised by what I heard; it was as if I was listening to music that was completely new to me. In a way, it reminded me of David Toop writing in Haunted Weather ‘Recordings are notorious for their habit of failing to mirror the pleasures (the horrors) of performance.’
As I went more into the details of this recording, I found a moment that really reflect the pleasure I had to play that night. We obviously went through periods of quasi-silence and really noisy sections, but every now and then we managed to create ephemeral states of relative tranquility where the music could gently float between the three of us. In those moments, I felt we were really onto something. Hopefully this will be continued…
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“A few years back I had filmed a bumble bee trapped in a spider’s web. I had tried to rescue it but it kept falling back into the web. I was left watching that deadly dance between the spider and the bumble bee.”
How people perceive our music is something quite mysterious and often not easily explainable by the listeners themselves. Music has always a polarising effect on a sizeable audience, but amongst people who feel connected to a particular track or album, how does it work, how does it affect them? A piece of music really becomes complete in the space it opens for the listener, a space intimately connected to the moment in which it’s experienced. That’s something that I find quite fascinating but of which I have rarely any insight.
Around the time I released the EP Liminal, back in 2011, Gianmarco Del Re wrote to me to say a particular track had really struck a chord with him, so he had created a loopable video to accompany the music. It’s only recently he released it publicly and for the matter wrote a really great text that appeared on Fluid Radio. Coming back to this idea of getting an insight on how music can affect an audience, this story reminds me of how unexpected this can be.
My debut album ‘The Silent Watcher’ originally released in February 2010 on Audiomoves had been officially relaunched on Audiobulb today. The music is still the same but the artwork had changed and once again comes courtesy of Peter Nejedly. In the process of choosing this new image, I went through the entirety of Peter’s gallery and was amazed by the consistent quality of his new work – really worth checking out!
