chasing tails

Despite the lack of words, instrumental music has an amazing capacity to invoke narratives, images and feelings. You can think of composers and performing musicians rather like authors; and like authors, they are only part of the story! The really exciting transformations happen inside the mind of the person perceiving it: meanings and associations take shape, change, and linger all by themselves. For many of us, it’s the very lack of specificity in music which makes the experience so compelling. The imagination is free, but strangely bounded at the same time. If the music seems to tell a story, it can be a different one every time, and yet it can’t be infinitely different. Like counterpoint - that is, the art of putting melodies against each other - fantasy is all about the dialogue between freedom and limits.

I often think about something the wonderful violinist and quartet leader Peter Cropper used to remind his students to be wary of, which went something along the lines of: “feels great, sounds awful”. (Yes, that is the cleaned-up version).

There’s a serious and interesting point here, which concerns that mental balance all musicians have to strike between one’s own internal perspective, and the sense of ‘what you actually sound like’ to somebody listening. Being able to inhabit that second zone comfortably and regularly is a really important part of performing. The brutal truth is that it’s very easy to be swept along by physical sensations or ‘ideas’ which simply don’t sound very convincing once you get outside of your own experience.

These recordings are enthusiastically, gloriously anachronistic. It’s also a been fascinating, rewarding and exponentially-expanding process of discovery.

As I said in the introduction, this was (and is) an experimental project. Of course, it’s meant to be a nice way in to some cracking music. But for me, it’s also a chance to try things out, get better at my instrument, and get comfortable with recording equipment and software. In this article, I wanted to have a brief look at the process of making the recordings you hear on the first album, both creatively and technically.