In amongst all the extremes of human emotion, distress, love, pain and messed up things in the database of submitted thoughts that went into the album, there was this lovely calm statement of seemingly just having a nice time. This was just as relevant a quote and experience, and something I wanted to include.
I decided to use the sounds of me walking through forest, which is my own equivalent of the idea I thought the quote was about, but I wanted to find some similarly grounded instrumental source as well. I happened to be touring in Australia and visiting my Uncle’s place in Brisbane. We were chatting about his folk music connections and events, and he showed me a little folk guitar of sorts. I strummed it and immediately had that thing that happens when there’s something in there which needs to be worked through into a piece of music. It’s a feeling, the feeling that could form a piece of music if I grab onto it, and the feeling that connects the music to the quote.
A lot of music comes this way for me, via having my antenna up, so to speak, and finding things when they present themselves, as opposed to sitting down to decide to make something at any particular point in time. I asked if I could borrow the instrument for a few minutes and take some time out in the basement by myself, I’m not sure if my uncle thought I was being strange, but I had my binaural mics with me as I always do for instances like this, and I went downstairs on my own to sit for 10 minutes and see what could come.
Now I had the binaural atmosphere from the crunching undergrowth, and the binaural strums, and I needed to develop it all. This came courtesy of a friend and legend of musical experimentations and creative tools, Dillon Bastan, whose Pathways device allowed me to draw paths through the spectral space of the instrumental, picking out grains and forming new melodic contours. I was thinking about all the jumbled everyday things in the surroundings and a sort of complex but softly enveloping content, if you can hear and feel what I mean. There’s also a dose of ambiguity in there from the quote, in that it’s odd to sit in a church listening to vinyl. It raises questions.