I wandered off into the sound- how I started to get into field recordings and other abstract music.

A good few years before I created my first album ’ anytime//nowhere’ I was out with my other half and various pieces of equipment recording the Dan course. We took a little walk through Cherry Orchard woods found a beautiful clearing at about 3:30 am. The first notes were ringing out of the day, fresh bright yellows and blues as the Sun started to peek its head up. He set up the microphone – to cardio microphones pointing in different directions to capture sound in a stereoscopic way.  There were some early starts, noise creeping out from the nearby trees, sun reaching out across the open fields and gaps in the trees. More and more join into, until before you know it the whole forest is alive and calling out in chorus to the giver of light and life.

It was glorious and wonderful and magical. It was nice to say good morning to the day for once rather than the morning scene hello to me.

More importantly, I so really enjoyed the process, it’s almost therapeutic and a little bit like meditating as you set up everything and just listen to the world existing and functioning around you. This was all that was needed to get all of the cogs wiring and as time progressed I thought more and more about it. I didn’t think to act on it at the time as I was very much deep in music and touring, but also starting to collect and distribute zines and poetry books, artwork, and such the like. I just simply didn’t fit it into a schedule.

Fast forward a few years on a depart ways making music with the guys, I start focusing more on myself and I create my first little art exhibition and release a few books but the thoughts of doing soundscapes and field recordings still sat very much in the middle of my mind. I’m a big fan of people like Kate Carr and Chris Watson i’ve got more interested in how they would put things together. I didn’t have the intelligence to be able to do all of the middy and sent stuff but I can edit and compose and I can record stuff so to me I felt like that was a good start.

This is where the first album came from, I liked the relationship between nature and the natural world in itself and the Urban and developed environment of the city that I live in as well as the town opposite the city across the River Thames and bits of London. To me nature and human development have to interact with each other they don’t have a choice, so it was predominantly listening to the way the world work around me and how those two subsections of common existence interacted and tried to keep out of each other’s way.

‘Anytime//nowhere’ took around a year and a half to record, edit down, arrange and put together and then mix and master.

I listen to it way too many times than I  care to mention making sure didn’t have the best reflection of the ideas that I wanted. Overall I’m very happy with the album as a whole. I have some things to learn and there are some things I would like to change, I would want it all to flow into the next as if it was one continuous piece. It would work better on some formats but not so well on things like tape and vinyl, if I ever get to the point of doing that. I’m not sure if it’ll leave the digital world but it’s up and happening and I’m happy over all. There’s more in the works to come.

But let’s push the boat out more, what is a more extreme example of the definition of music? Or even of sound? What of the world of harsh noise wall. Harsh noise wall or HNW came out of the 90’s as a far more experimental style of sound and music, coming from huge non-linear, non-repetitive sounds. This style is so far from anything else it almost starts to leak back into calming and soothing, but in a spiky and overstretched way. Enter ‘GOUGE.’ This became a collection of layers and layers of noises, sounds, conversations, sometimes music that crash together, some with deeper, distorted layers and others as scratching, violent and more jarring sounds. The weight of this made the software crash multiple times while I made this, which seemed to be the most fitting thing possible, I pushed the computer and software to the same limits I pushed the album.

I would urge you to climb inside first the more mellow album and then lower yourself into ‘GOUGE’ as more of a test of your own ability. Personally the level of chaos fascinated me and seems to stun my mind into silence as I try pick out my voice in the mixing bowl of glass and mud. I can say without a doubt there will be more for HNW purely out of morbid curiosity. I have no interest in listens, views or any of that over the top corporate shit, I want to push and sit, listen and scream, walk and fly, sleep and sprint.

I have plans to make another piece like ‘Anytime//nowhere’ involving different locations and different moods. I want to use different software and add some plug ins, helping the feelings mix and the locations blur into another continuous stream.

‘GOUGE’ was never set out to be this, rather episodes of overwhelming excitement, reflecting the way my mind felt when I put everything in place.

I wandered off into the dawn I once recorded to see where the light came from, the surprise was that it was to bright for me to see, so I felt my way around and grabbed what I could to take back with me.

Next time I think I’ll wear gloves.