THE NOISE HE KEPT SO QUIET

First single of larger project titled Piano Textura, a series of textured piano compositions which started as an investigation into sustaining tones using electronic bows on the piano strings. Available now to download or stream on all digital platforms .

Project Notes

I have been writing about things for the past decade: stories, moving pictures, plays and movement. I desired change, a freedom to escape my normal way of working coupled with the desire of a more visceral approach, something liberating and free.

This Piano Tekstura project is a series of portraits, a series of snapshots of a moment in time. Most of the pieces were written or recorded in isolation (before isolation became mandatory) over the winter of 2019/2020 in my studio in the former ship yards of the Clyde. As such the pieces are reflective and intimate in nature and reflect in some way the dark romanticism I associate with Glasgow, a post industrial yet romantic city.

To begin work I would sit at the piano and enjoy myself, for that is all I had decided in advance. Stravinsky compared composition to a boar looking for truffles in the wood and in this vein I would search and play around simply looking for something to catch my ear and hope this thing would suggest something else and so, over the course of minutes, days or weeks, pieces of music would appear, pieces that represent the feelings I had at that particular time, a chain reaction of thoughts.

The piano, as dynamic as it is, is incapable of sustaining - the second you strike a note that is the loudest it will ever be. As soon as it’s born it dies away, even with the sustain pedal on it will eventually fade. This, in my opinion adds to it’s beauty, but with this in mind I wished to experiment in ways to artificially sustain notes during the production of the recordings. Using an ebow, which I normally reserve for use on guitars and stringed instruments, I could make certain piano notes ring out indefinitely like holding down the notes of an organ. Again, if I were writing for a film or stage production the reason for doing this would come from something in the story or image I’m trying to represent. Here it is simply an idea, an experiment I wished to pursue out of curiosity. This was the catalyst for the other instruments and sounds which eventually made their way onto the recordings.

With technology dominating most other areas of my life and with a desire to return to something more organic I largely eschewed digital processing and the use of synthesisers. All the textures were mixed in live through guitar pedals. The buried sounds and textures on which the piano pieces sit are field recordings from Glasgow - rivers, roads, parks, post-industrial soundscapes. In most cases I don’t utilise them for their inherent sound content but to add a certain warmth or texture akin to tape hiss or vinyl static.

Although my interest has gradually moved away from lyric song writing, words are important in creating rhythm and melody. I’ll often sing syllables which dictate melodic arc. These syllables sometimes form words which have relevance to the ideas of the piece but will always be discarded and replaced.