After an intensive period writing, recording and performing the Landscape and Memory collection, comes an aftermath …
This latest collection is more abstract – a set of free flowing improvisations with no predetermined starting points. There has been nothing in the way of advance preparation in recording these spontaneous improvisations, beyond determining keys and tempos. The fingers are let off the leash – to go rambling where they may. At the time of playing they feel like so much unstructured meandering.
But listening back to the recorded results is fascinating – the brain is obviously and subconsciously structuring and developing material as the ideas unfold. This rather messy and seemingly haphazard way of working does bring benefits. It can be high risk, but I find that I get a ‘flow’ that I hardly ever achieve with more structured compositional approaches. There will always be the odd stray note, where pitch and articulation are less than perfect, but it’s a trade off worth making.
The music just flows along, but I find writing about it is not easy. And finding titles is especially hard work. So I lean on the words of others. In the case of this album, I acknowledge a debt to William Wordsworth and his poem Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey. He describes how his memory of these beautiful places has worked upon him in his absence from them: when he was alone, or in crowded towns and cities. Which is exactly my case as I write these tunes and words in a basement studio in Sheffield. Wordsworth’s poem provides so many excellent possibilities for titles. I pluck the titles at random from this rich textual source and assign them to the tunes in what seems to be an arbitrary way.
Yet the more I listen back, the more these titles seem to fit the moods of their respective pieces. Perhaps the association comes from familiarity, or perhaps there are more cosmic forces at work.
david ashworth 