Border Land

" airy and mystical harmonies float in unknown zones, feeling more like undiscovered nebulae, stretching out over eternity and crossing infinite divides"  Fluid Radio “highly evocative work of the otherworldly transforms the recognizable into something mysterious, even on occasion, the supernatural” Monolith Cocktail “electro-orchestral drone-scapes of, by turns, gauzy intimacy and soaring grandeur.” Mojo The field recording material for Sacred Geometries & Not One Thing came from a road trip to the island of Westray in The Orkneys. In Not One Thing there is a recording taken from wind blowing through a metal gate to a lighthouse on Noup Head. The gate was singing. It had three holes either from missing screws or where it rusted in the elements. These emitted three different pitches which interacted in an unpredictably pleasant way. That evening I listened to Don Cherry’s Organic Music, it felt that in some ways he was emulating the way that gate played. No metronomic pulse and unpredictable. It was like he embodied or invoked the spirit of the natural elements removing his human need for regularity and simplification. I wanted to see if I could do something similar with the cello. Mimic the wind blowing through that gate. A lot of the tracks on this album are inspired in one way or another by my stay in the landscape of Westray And on to the title Border Land. With my last album Song Lines, it occurred to me how nudging a melody microtonally & rhythmically in different directions, changing the emphasis and intention, the music would transcend national and cultural boundaries. The story of human migration is carried in the DNA of all musics. Melodies and tonalities traverse large distances and evolve through time. My feeling that culture and creativity can only exist when this flux can happen. Border Land takes the idea further. Life itself is born from this flow, the convolutions at the boundary between things. There is one idea that the Earth exists in a ‘Goldilocks’ Zone it is at the border of not too hot and not too cold. The energies are not so chaotic to fall over into just noise, total lack of information and structure. Nor or they so little that nothing can happen and everything falls into a hole of unchanging stasis. Like the balance of the wind blowing through that metal gate. So this is an album of the elements. An attempt to make friends & understand an ailing and dying planet