Here’s news of two sets of recordings – one recently issued and another to be released in January.
Now available – Landscape & Memory
The music on this album was written as a soundtrack for a multimedia project – exploring the Cocker Valley in the Lake District in the company of old school friends. More information on this project can be found here: https://cockervalley.wordpress.com/
Coming in January 2024 – All Sweet Sounds and Harmonies
After an intensive period writing, recording and performing the Landscape and Memory collection, comes an aftermath …. This latest collection is more abstract – a sparkling collection of free flowing improvisations, some you can preview here:
The starting points for this Project began in 2021. I had been reading Wordsworth’s Duddon Sonnets, which were inspired by his walking the length of the river Duddon in the South Lakes.
It wasn’t the poems in this collection that appealed particularly, but more what Wordsworth was trying to do within this framework. Rather than using a sequence of poems to literally describe the stages of the walk, he takes a different approach. Sometimes he does describe what he is seeing, other times it’s a basis for more abstract philosophical reflections or he may drift away from the path to explore other areas of interest in the vicinity.
So my original intention was to recreate this journey for myself, reflecting on it in music rather than words.
Around this time, I got in touch with an old friend from schooldays. Rupert Ashmore is a keen and accomplished photographer and we worked together on a collection of music/image pieces. Rupert gave me some remarkable images from his collection of Lake District photographs which inspired the music I recorded for my 2021 album Under a Generous Sky.
So it seemed to make good sense to invite Rupert to walk the Duddon Valley with me – partly for the sheer enjoyment of walking together and hopefully lead to another multimedia creation. Covid restrictions put this plan on hold for a while, during which time I found myself going off the idea. I have no real connection with the Duddon Valley and was starting to feel that I would prefer to walk along a river with which I had a strong connection. Having spent my formative years in Cockermouth, the river Cocker was an obvious choice – and Rupert required little persuasion to change locations.
The problem we had was that there is no obvious way of walking along the river from source to mouth. But I remembered that although Wordsworth could have easily kept to the banks of the Duddon for most of his walk, he expanded his horizons to include the wider valley. So perhaps we could do something similar – a valley walk rather than a river walk?
Although I have spent a considerable amount of time in the hills and on the shores of the lakes in this valley, I had never before contemplated a linear walk along its length – and could see no obvious way of doing it … but then fortune smiled.
On a short visit to Cockermouth, I noticed a poster advertising a series of events taking place at Wordsworth House. One of these was a talk given by Angus Winchester on “The Language of the Landscape“. This was very exciting. Here was a talk given by someone who was exploring the landscape of the Cocker Valley – an area he knew very well. And the other important thing was that Angus also happened to be a mutual friend from schooldays. Slightly more dispiriting was the fact that this event had taken place a few days prior to my happening on this poster. A setback, but I could see a way forward. A short exchange of emails led to a reuniting of friends and we sketched out the beginnings of a project …
I seemed to hold two lives – the life of thought, and that of reality.”
Charlotte Brontë, Villette
We might not recognise it, but we all lead double lives. In his Essay on Aesthetics, Roger Fry describes them thus:
… one the actual life, the other the imaginative life. Between these two lives there is this great distinction, that in the actual life the processes of natural selection have brought it about that the instinctive reaction, such, for instance, as flight from danger, shall be the important part of the whole process, and it is towards this that the man bends his whole conscious endeavour. But in the imaginative life no such action is necessary, and, therefore, the whole consciousness may be focussed upon the perceptive and the emotional aspects of the experience. In this way we get, in the imaginative life, a different set of values, and a different kind of perception.
I’m currently engaged on a multimedia project and the importance of this distinction was brought home to me on a field trip with the photographer whose images will ultimately form part of this work. We were beside a beck in the Lorton valley in Cumbria – he was moving rapidly and purposefully over the area, capturing something of the essence of the place through photography. I was just standing and soaking it all in.
At one point, he came across to me and asked if I was getting any ideas for my musical responses and I had to say that I wasn’t – that would come later. Reflecting on this a few days later, I found myself asking why this should be the case. And it is Fry who provides the answer. The ‘actual life’, the process of being there, involves so many real time distractions it is impossible to adequately focus on the ‘imaginative life’. So while I was obviously enjoying being in this inspiring and uplifting place, the day to day thoughts would be piling in. We had parked the car in a narrow lane – would cars and tractors be able to get past us? There was a bull further up the field that we probably needed to keep an eye on. The clouds were rolling in from the west – rain ahead and so on.
To have been immersed in the experience of being in this location is an important and essential prerequisite, but before music making can begin, I find It necessary to have a certain personal distance from the event or experience being described; what Wordsworth refers to in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads as “emotion recollected in tranquillity”. And these photographs are vital to those recollections and any subsequent music making. They do more than simply record the scene. They attempt to bring out underlying truths and meanings. In this case, we are thinking about boundaries, exploring new territories (literal and metaphorical) as we move up the valley from the farmlands into the mountains.
I’ll be writing more about this project over the next few months. In the meantime, enjoy the view …
A few days ago, I shared details of my forthcoming album, “Where the wild time blows”. Readers of my blogs, and social network postings, were given a video preview of track excerpts and the artwork for the album cover. One of my readers, who happens to be a good friend, kindly sent over some recent photos he has taken of wild flowers. Now my original flower photographs are quite good, but his pictures take it to another level. Putting it simply, but hopefully a bit profoundly, they ‘speak’ to us and engage us in a dialogue which is internal and usually non verbal. So thanks to him, I now have a much better image for my album cover.
Now most of us can take snapshots which are sometimes good (but often aren’t), yet the best photographers capture images which can rightfully be considered works of art. And it’s not primarily to do with equipment. Of course, all of us working in the arts and beyond want access to good quality tools. Like most aspiring young guitar players, I was constantly in and out of music shops, trying out different instruments, discussing guitars and related accessories with friends, spending time at gigs weighing up what gear others were using. What brand of strings? What gauge? What plectrum/amplifier/pickups and so on. And it’s possible to get so distracted by these things that you take your eye off what should be the main focus – the making of music. Some of the best music I have heard has been made with modest instruments. Listen to the music of those legendary early blues musicians. And Shakespeare didn’t write better plays because he had a better pencil than his contemporaries.
The best artists across the art forms achieve quality by always being on the alert to the possibilities. The possibility of interpreting and expressing a truth and reality through words, images, music, movement … And these possibilities can happen anywhere. We don’t need to fly off to exotic locations to find a stimulus.
The photograph above was taken using a mobile phone. It was taken on a roadside verge in Beckfoot, near Allonby, Cumbria. On a grey, cloudy windswept day, it can come across as a drab stretch of coastline. But we all have our day in the sun, literally and figuratively, and for Beckfoot this was one of them. So sometimes we get lucky and are in the right place at the right time. Other times, we have to be patient and wait. And this is true, whether it be writing, taking pictures or creating music.
Many people have photographed the Swinside Stone Circle in Cumbria and you can see the results by Googling. They all show a bunch of stones in a field. That’s what you get if you just show up and click your camera. But if you camp out there on the night of the summer equinox and tumble out of your sleeping bag just bedore dawn, you might get this:
So for a forthcoming collaboration with Rupert, I’m looking forward to spending an evening sitting by a mountaintop tarn in the Lake District as he takes photographs of the setting sun. It may be cold and uncomfortable and we may have to scramble down using torches … fortunately it’s a good well defined track. The weather and lighting may be against us, so we might have to make more than one visit. But the effort should be worth it. We should have some imagery, and subsequently music, which express those things that cannot be put into words.
And if you want to hear my music inspired by this fabulous image of Swinside, it’s here:
The title for this collection of pieces comes from Shakespeare, referring to the woods where the wild flowers grow – those enchanted spaces, secret, unplanted, untended, transcending time and place. Today, we can extend these spaces to include a whole range of unmanaged and neglected spaces; railway embankments, the wastelands behind factories and roadside cafes, the banks of motorways where unfortunate drivers wait for the recovery trucks … These are the spaces we do not seek out, but they are the places where we will often find what Shakespeare found – wild flowers.
From new life to death, from purity to passion, wild flowers have had many meanings in myths and legends. Flowers are associated with youth, beauty, and pleasure. But as they wilt and die, flowers represent fragility and the swift passage from life into death.
These themes, coupled with the sheer variety and beauty to be found in flowers provides plenty of scope for artistic reflection.
Album release 31st October 2022, but you can preview it here:
Time can be a problem – finding the time to do all the things you want to do. And in some ways, it gets worse with advancing age. Years now seem to fly by compared with the pace of childhood years – it seems our subjective experience of time bears little relation to the way we like to measure it on a clock.
Alain de Botton says:
The difference in pace is not mysterious; it has to do with novelty. The more our days are filled with new, unpredictable and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. Conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in a blur. Childhood ends up feeling so long because it is the cauldron of novelty. Its most ordinary days are packed with extraordinary discoveries and sensations.
W. H. Davies (1871-1940)
And as W H Davies says in his poem Leisure, we need to make time to just stand and stare. So that is what I aim to do now. If I go into an art gallery, I now spend my time there with just one or two paintings, sitting and staring – and thinking/dreaming. And if it is a good painting, this is a worthwhile thing to do. Gradually, the painting reveals its insights and meanings that may sometimes lie too deep for words but nevertheless make sense on deeper levels.
And the same with music. I’ve found that music which has instant appeal does not always have a lasting appeal. Of course, there are exceptions. For example, with many of the songs Paul McCartney has written in recent years, the charm and simplicity often belies considerable depth and beauty.
But some music does take time to fully appreciate. Much of Radiohead’s music from Kid A onwards can seem quite dense and unapproachable on a first listen, but if we take the time, just to listen closely, the layers of sound become clearer and deeper appreciation becomes possible.
Of course, it may be that with some music which is dense and complex we are never going to get much from it. We may waste valuable time vainly trying to make sense of music which refuses to yield anything of interest or value. There is a danger of wasting time by going down blind alleys. So these days, I tend to spend a little less time digging out new listening experiences and more time going for a deeper appreciation of music by artists I already know and trust.
For example, I’ll admit to being mildly disappointed by Bowie’s final album Black Star on a first listen. But because I have a deep respect for his work, there is a level of trust for me which means I was prepared to take time with this album. And sure enough, the inner beauty of these songs becomes gloriously clear with repeated listens.
With musicians who are given to innovation, experimenting and trying new things, there is always the danger that occasionally their efforts will fail. Most of the artists I admire have occasionally written and recorded some duds, but we accept them for the innovative music which transcends what has gone before. It’s no big deal for them or us. As Brian Eno once said “with art you can crash your plane and just walk away from it”.
So to find more time – to make more time – we may need to seek out Botton’s new, unpredictable and challenging experiences in music and beyond. Slow listening, deep listening may make for longer days …
There was a time in the late 1960s when rock music seemed to be trying to break free from the confines of the standard pop song ‘formulas’ and move along more musically open and adventurous pathways. Fusions seemed to offer ways forward – the prog rock brigade harnessed the bombastic energy of late romantic classical works, folk and rock melded together, rock musicians such as Hendrix looked for ways of connecting with jazz musicians such as Miles Davis …
Other musicians from John Cage to Brian Eno looked outside of music for systems and processes which might inform new ways of working. Cage would roll dice, Eno would use his oblique strategies cards, bringing elements of chance and chaos into their work. I first became aware of these experiments when reading about the Bowie/Eno collaborations which guided some of the more interesting tracks on Bowie’s ‘Berlin’ albums.
More recently, I’m reading Leah Kardos’ new publication ‘Black Star Theory‘, which explores this further. She points out that throughout his career, Bowie had invited chaos and chance into his creative practice, readily embracing experimentation and risk. She quotes Bowie:
David Bowie, 15 years old
‘If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting’
Bowie embraced experimentation and risk to the very end of his recording career. To quote from Kardos:
Black Star’s new territory is distinguished by a tangible sense of barely tamed chaos, especially in the first half; textural intensity, a feeling of losing control, where the music itself seems on the edge of danger. By passing his compositions over to a group of improvising musicians, Bowie was given access to a creative zone that allowed him to engage with and communicate chaos in his songwriting, through the creation of intensities, forces and sensations. Working with improvising musicians with an already finely tuned chemistry meant that the instrumental backing for ★ could be tracked live, capturing a special energy. This was Bowie’s preferred way of working, the ‘greasy’ process that Gerry Leonard had once described (Leonard 2013) being the special quality created by musicians working together in real time, playing off each other in the same environment. ‘Liveness’ can be a rare and precious quality in our contemporary age of digital multitrack recording, with its capacity for piecemeal and remote musical construction, and increasingly sophisticated editing tools promoting more refined and atomized aesthetics in mainstream music culture.
Perhaps these final recordings will prove to be his greatest legacy – rekindling the relationship between jazz and rock, giving today’s bolder musicians ideas to think about and work with in pushing the genre ever forward as we move further into the 21st C.
Paul McCartney
A final thought. I first came across the interfusing of the concepts of chaos and creation in the title of Paul McCartney’s 2005 album Chaos And Creation In The Backyard. Interestingly, the album cover photo is a very early pic of Paul strumming a guitar in the family back garden. It reminds me of an early photo of Bowie playing sax when he was just starting out [see photo above]. Both pictures capture that feeling of tentatively exploring the possibilities of playing an instrument before you really know how to play it or understand much about music. Yet these early, often naive, ramblings and noodlings would occasionally throw up some beautiful things. Chaos sparking chance phrases of richly creative musical moments. Fleeting and ephemeral, these moments are lost forever once we learn how to play properly. Perhaps it is only towards the end of our musical lives we are prepared to break free from the musical conventions we have relied on for decades and transcend into music making often fraught with risk and danger but, on good days, yielding music of richness and depths previously untapped.
Playing the 12 string guitar – a personal approach
Battersea Bridge is the first album I have recorded which features a 12 string guitar. I purchased this instrument about 35 years ago and it has been lying in a cupboard ever since – until now. An earlier blog on this site gives a bit more background to this instrument, and my initial explorations in coming to terms with how to play this guitar. It also contains a link to some rough and ready demo recordings.
Inevitably and understandably, guitarists approaching a 12 string for the first time will try to play it as a 6 string. This approach sort of works up to a point. Compared with a standard acoustic guitar, it gives a richer, fuller sound when strumming chords. But there are drawbacks – the sound can be rather muddy and unfocussed when 12 strings are resonating at the same time. I have discovered that there is so much opportunity for doing something musically quite distinctive when you take the time to explore the potential of this instrument and its interesting configuration of 12 strings.
I began by listening to some of the great acoustic 12 string players who have gone before. Ralph Towner is the acknowledged virtuoso whose staggering technique shows what can be achieved … Rather more approachable is the work of the legendary American player,John Fahey. He likes to slow things down so you can really savour the special resonances and sympathetic vibrations from adjacent open strings. But the player who has shown me the way forward is Julia Reidy – a contemporary player based in Berlin. In some ways, she builds on foundations laid by Fahey, but takes the music away from its associations with Americana into more of a Harold Budd/Brian Eno direction. Occasionally she will use some electronic effects to subtly enhance the sound.
Taking things slowly and allowing open strings to resonate and use as drones provides a lovely background wash of sound on which to paint melodic lines. I find these melodies work best by playing along (as opposed to across) the strings – up and down the neck. To explain why this is the case, I should perhaps talk about how the strings are arranged and tuned. The strings are arranged into six pairs tuned as follows (low to high) E A D G B E’. In a little more detail:
Low E – this pair are wound strings tuned in octaves
A, D and G pairs – a wound and plain steel string tuned in octaves
B and E pairs – plain steel strings tuned in unison (same pitch).
So for a melodic line to sound tonally consistent, it makes sense to try and keep the notes on strings with the same configurations. I therefore try to keep some melodies on the B and E strings and others on the A,D G set.
The string pairs tuned in octaves are interesting. A down stroke with the plectrum means you hit the higher octave string first – so that will dominate and sound a bit stronger than the lower string in the pair. An upstroke accents the lower octave string. So there is some potential for interesting control and manipulation of the sound here.
Using conventional chord shapes can be a bit unwieldy, so I make far more use of open string drones. Handled carefully this can result in interesting and unusual harmonies and chord voicings.
Writing about this in such detail might well give the wrong impression. This was not some sort of preconfigured analytical approach. This personal approach to playing this guitar came together gradually as a result of much exploring and experimenting – noodling and letting the fingers lead the way. I recorded these ideas as I went along and have released these as demos for those interested in hearing how a sound evolves.
The result is a collection I can refer back to for ideas for more developed works, such as the current Battersea Bridge collection. An index of possibilities which you can hear and download for free from the link below:
In an earlier article in this series, I talked about how the River flows endlessly to the sea. A self renewing process – the water evaporates over the seas, forming clouds which move inland to rain again. But there is another flow process taking place here. There are no figures visible in any of these scenes, but there is a constant flow of humanity commuting back and forth in buses across the river. And nearly every photograph in the collection features at least one bus.
The final set of photos shows a bus disappearing into fog. Of this scene, Rupert says:
I like the idea that the fog lifts the bridge out of its urban situation and you can imagine it anywhere you like and especially when the far end of it disappears into fog you can speculate as to whether it goes somewhere or not, maybe it just ends in nothing and the buses will never be seen again, a bit like the journey across the river Styx
Perhaps we will not see them again. They may be going towards that brutalist blocks of flats, set behind the Bridge, in a district of Chelsea known as World’s End. In the fog, those containers of people, buses and flats, disappear from view.
This tidal flow of rush hour commuters is a human cycle. The passengers – moving passively in carriages shuttling back and forth, through the warp and weft of each day as they weave the tapestries of their stories and their lives. Like the River which empties endlessly into the sea, the people are part of a self renewing process – an endless cycle, a rising and falling tide of humanity … a river of life.
Thomas Campion recognises this process in his poem The River of Life which begins:
Resonance is being able to evoke emotions or the condition of being full and deep in character. … Richness or significance, especially in evoking an association or strong emotion.
I expect most of us will have experienced this phenomenon at various times:
You are flicking through a poetry anthology when suddenly one leaps off the page at you …
Your kitchen radio is playing a selection of music in the background when a piece you have never heard before grabs your attention …
Wandering fairly aimlessly through an art gallery, an unfamiliar painting stops you in your tracks …
The most recent instances of this, for me, have been some of the photographs taken by Rupert Ashmore. With Instagram, Pinterest et al we are all slowly becoming immune to the charms of photography. There are only so many sunsets over beaches and snow falling on cobbled streets we can take. But Rupert’s photographs are different – they grab my attention and make an impact. I recorded my musical responses to some of his photos on my recent collection of recordings “Under a Generous Sky”. Now I suppose it is obvious that I would make a strong connection with these scenes – they capture places I know well from childhood days in Cumbria, and so they are almost bound to evoke a response.
But then Rupert sent me a batch of photographs of a world with which I have no real connection – scenes of London in fog. In particular, one of Battersea Bridge I found particularly engaging, so Rupert kindly sent me an avalanche of photographs of the Bridge, taken at various times in a variety of weather conditions. Powerful and deeply moving scenes.
So this got me thinking – what was it about these pictures (and those various poems, paintings and music referred to earlier) that gave rise to these powerful responses? There must be something about them which resonates with me at a deeper, possibly subconscious level. More abstract stimulus which triggers deeply buried and half forgotten memories.
So although Battersea Bridge is an unfamiliar location for me, these are elements in these pictures which are familiar to me in other contexts –
the sun setting behind buildings bringing beauty and mystery to what in full daylight are prosaic everyday scenes
Buses disappearing into fog
Moonlight and streetlight reflections rippling on water
So the times and places are long forgotten but the sensation and associated feelings still lie buried deep in the memory and it is as though these memory cells are triggered into responding at a subconscious level – a resonance.
Resonances which stir strong emotions and memories which often lie too deep for words. But through making music, I hope to get close to these things.
david ashworth 