Lines

Tor Press released a four cd set of my sustained and suspended sounds made with viola, harmonica, and feedback:

Each disk features beautiful handmade linocut artwork from Jake Blanchard.

I’ve never set out to do anything linearly, but lines happen anyway.

Around 2011, my friend Jakub and I, with other friends and colleagues, would regularly visit the house his grandfather built by hand in Všenory, in the Czech Republic, for art making, discussing, and hanging out, usually around a fire. I began to use a small rectangular basement passage full of tools and firewood as a little studio on these visits. The ceiling was low, so I sat on a small stool on the floor where I could bow, and played sustained sounds with feedback, and also sometimes using my voice or a harmonica, until the whole place felt like the inside of a vibrating string.

I recorded some of these continuities, slowly, and after moving to the UK in 2014 I started to edit and mix them a little bit, and eventually they separated themselves out and became the Lines on these four cds.

Jake Blanchard has created a lovely release for these with custom, hand-made linocut prints for each of the cds.

For me, these pieces resonate strongly with my thinking about other forms I experience in the environment. These aren’t lines that separate anything from anything else, but openings, like a deep valley in a landscape of contrasting texture or a mountain range seen from above.

Maybe they existed in the viola strings, the wires, the harmonica reeds and the shape of the basement space just waiting for all these things to come together. Maybe the sound here is the sound of that basement space, like the way a mineral crystal or fossil might emerge from some liquid filled hollow in some other form. But I think that they also spill out, push forward on their own, and take on their own shapes like young versions of rivers that will later meander across the landscape, shaping it.