apsomeophone

Vinyl purchasers will be emailed a download code for the simultaneous digital reissue on Room40. LP tracklisting: A1: were holes mended? A2: forged baggage 2. A3: bad snake laugh. A4: money's dark night. B1: travel over books roughly. B2: forged baggage 2. B3: voices of the airshaft 2. B4: satan wash. A record of odes originally released on CD in 2005 by Lexicon Devil Records (lexdev017). All the pieces on ‘apsomeophone’ began from a pressing need I felt to incrementally compose a group of compositions designed to provide me with an instant ensemble accompaniment for my improvised live performances. I started by borrowing isolated sounds or very short passages from compositions I loved, and subsequently I edited them further or processed these fragments to points beyond recognition, I then added elements of my own playing and bits of environmental recordings I had made. In a sort of following my nose, or ear way, I began to cobble and form these sounds into groupings and further add to, subtract from and process these groupings until they started to develop some sort of formal drama. Throughout the gestation of the pieces on ‘apsomeophone’ I was immured in a world of fascination with the arbitrary conjunction of somewhat opposing elements, for example: Hi Art with Low Art, acoustic with electric, analogue with digital, abstract with formal, etc. When the 'backing' compositions were complete I then performed live to their accompaniment, improvising, doing the prepared guitar on my lap thing and utilising an amount of stomp box processing as well. I subsequently made recordings of these overdubbed improvisations, now entwined with the original ensemble pieces, but in most instances felt underwhelmed by the results as stand alone recordings. So, another wave of editing began, the same processes of addition, subtraction and transformation followed through until the finished pieces felt right. Title selection for the finished pieces mirrored the compositional process, in that I historically extract small phrases from literature and other sources that strike a chord with me at the moment of reading. These extractions are then selected and sometimes edited. Outside their original context they marry themselves to pieces of music. I guess in some way it's all a sort of current Surrealist procedure.