New Album: Crossing Ligeia Mare

I'm clearing out my house in more ways than one at the moment -- this project has been in the "nearly done" category for a very long time and I'm delighted to be able to release it at last -- more info below the fold:

This is one of those projects that started with a strong idea and ended up throwing it away, which meant I had some rough material that I found compelling but didn't know how to finish. So be warned, this post will be even more of a rambling journey than usual...

The process began with my discovery of Sui Zen, a Buddhist practice involving "playing" the shakuhachi not so much as a musical instrument in the conventional Western sense but as an aid to meditation. As some people look at a candle flame or listen to some natural sound or other to hold their focus, others make their breath audible through the bamboo flute.

I honestly don't know enough to be able to tell real history from mythmaking here, and in English-language resources and English-dominated sites like YouTube I found a preponderance of contemporary Western practitioners but wasn't able to find much purporting to be "authentic" recordings of Komuso monks practising Sui Zen besides this rather wobbly video recording:

This chimed with a theme I should write about more in a separate blog -- the idea of "moment form" as a way to think about some modernist compositional practices. Zen meditation and total serialism probably don't have much in common but there's a shared thread here of attending to the moment and not being too concerned with anything besides what's happening right now.

Anyway, by my usual chain of associations this led me to an experiment. In Reaper I set up a sound file (it didn't matter much what, as long as it had plenty of dynamic and pitch variation but no tuned pitches, so ambient sounds worked better). I put the built-in ReaTune plug in after the audio file and watched it jumping around trying to figure out what pitch was playing. I then configured it to send its MIDI information to another channel, where a VST instrument picked it up.

This sounds like it would produce nonsense, and it kind of does, but it's nonsense with a certain kind of consistent logic to it. You can mess about with putting a gate on the audio and various constrains on ReaTune and the MIDI that comes out with it and end up with a transformed verson of the sound you started with, created by forcing a synthesizer to "play along with" the sound as best it can. None of this, I know, sounds very Zen; we've left the monks behind already I'm afraid. But the common thread of an idea was to make sounds that respond indifferently to their environment rather than trying to form them intentionally.

Anyway, this produced something that had interesting elements but was of course not very satisfactory on its own, so the project sat around for a long time on my hard drive doing nothing. However, I would occasionally pull the project up and listen to it and kept thinking there was something in it. It reminded me of Morton Feldman's music, which has that odd stillness and naturalness about it:

Over time I started treating the sounds I'd found as raw material; rendered them out, messed about with them and added layers that I arrived at by more conventional means, but always responding to the original sounds. And I ended up with music that was full of detail but sounded empty, cold and weirdly quiet.

Along the way, for a while I started thinking of the suite of pieces as a symphony. I've always wanted to write a symphony. Of course that's not what this is but the idea sustained me for a while and there's a more "symphonic" conception here than in any of my work since Centaur, and more things that sound like orchestral instruments than I've used since The Chymical Wedding. I think I ended up channeling some formative Nordic influences like Saariaho's Grall Theatre, one of my all-time favourite violin concerti:

Somewhere along the line, these pieces crossed paths with my rather Romantic interest in space exploration and especially Saturn's moon Titan. This music seemed to be the perfect soundtrack for looking at NASA images of Titan's surface and reading about its extraordinary geography. I'm not a great believer in picture-music but this imaginary element provided the final focus I needed to get to work finishing the tracks.

Well, that and a practical matter. I'll be moving house soon -- leaving London and my home of nearly 20 years for a cottage in the countryside, where I hope to be able to set up a studio that solves some of the problems I've faced in my current one. Let's be honest, I expect it to solve all my problems but know perfectly well it will create a host of new and hopefully interesting ones. Anyway, I wanted to finish off my pending projects as I have a long list of new ideas that I'm itching to get into once the studio is up and running.