I think the music I release is deceptive in its simplicity, still requiring thought and understanding. As a child, I longed to be awake late at night, when the street-lights would illuminate the house with their sodium charged glow, creating long, distorted shadows of curtains and doors, and where the sounds of a quiet, suburban street grew to fill the silence. There was no traffic to speak off. We lived on an estate without shops, pubs or any other services to speak of. Work was primarily supplied by an industrial mix of factories and warehousing, so the shift patterns cemented a series of rush hours, leaving the streets free of traffic in-between. The lack of sound allowed the imagination to grow, and the shadows offered these dreams shape. It is still these sounds I am fascinated with, some 40-odd years later, and it is these sounds I try to recreate, capturing the flights of fancy they were born from, narrated, and augmented.
The latest collection of sounds are born of the sense I seek to make of this frustrated silence, and the struggles of the mind to live with this constant noise, against the will for mindful reflection. Alan Watts explores the sense of drama and all sound starting from nothing:
“I want you to think of the curious sensation of nothing
that lies behind ourselves Think of the blank space behind
the eyes. about the silence out of which all sound comes. and
about empty space. out of which all the stars appear.” (1977, p55)
The sounds of any space are perceptions of the intersection between yourself and the physics of the space around you. The dreams of this music are ghosts of the culture around me. Imagine yourself as a child, awake in the night, fascinated by the sounds of the wind, distant conversation, the sounds of a world at night. this is a time before all-night television, electronic media was limited to the radio and electric light. At night, the world becomes an empty space, haunted by the memory of the day, each home isolated in the dark. Capturing the memory of this, the essence of being haunted by the silence of a North London cul-de-sac, and finding fuel for these memories in the sonics of digital sound. That is my goal.
