Abstract

This body of work comprises a collection of songs exploring the relationship between digitally recorded music and physical space.

‘Musicians have always reflected their environments in ways which are incorporated into the music’s structure and purpose’, says David Toop (1995).

Physical space and place have come to mean a lot less in music in recent times. Since the earliest days, musicians always had to be in one place, at one time, to make music together. Before the advent of the recording studio, that meant that each performance was unique and distinct from any others, even of the same work. When studio recording became prevalent, it still meant the musicians performing together in a space, often around a single microphone, ‘mixing’ themselves by their physical position in the room. This led to the creation of the artefact of the recorded song - one performance in one time and place that is set in stone and can be experienced in a disembodied way by listeners in a different environment, likely entirely different from the one in which it was created.

In more modern times, this has been taken to extremes. Musicians can collaborate across the world, and almost all recorded music is readily available to consumers within seconds via the internet. The portability of devices means music is no longer listened to as ritually - live, or on a home hi-fi system or record player - but can be used on the go almost as a wallpaper; a backdrop or soundtrack to everyday events. This is a different use of music than is traditional. Music can begin to mean in relation to a specific space, time or memory unrelated to the music itself. It can be taken to diasporic locations, and in turn locations brought back into the music.

Jack Chuter in Storm Static Sleep (2015) puts this succinctly when discussing the work of Mark Hollis of Talk Talk, after his rebellion against major label dilution of his ideas: ‘Next, there was the use of the studio as a tool for re-arranging time and space to create new compositional shapes, cutting up recordings and replanting them elsewhere. The honesty of the real-time document collided with the retrospective time-space tampering of the studio.’ (my emphasis)

The word ‘replanting’ here is especially potent as it seems to compare an idea to an organic thing, which when planted within a different context may go on to grow in a new way. Taking sounds that do not traditionally belong in a song and allowing them to grow there, interact with the instruments and create a new sound-world unheard before is a process which allows the music to take on a life of its own, and develop beyond the decisions of a composer/arranger.

This collection of songs brings field-recorded sound environments into studio-composed arrangements, creating interactions of specific moments in time and place with the amorphous 'time-space tampering' of the studio, exploring notions of the meaning of place, as well as of climate breakdown and the changing environments we live in, physically and digitally.