For a period of about six months from late Autumn last year to early Spring this year I was working near to Harmondsworth Moor, and had the opportunity to go out wandering over the moor at lunchtimes. I took some pictures –

and, whilst staying overnight at the very accommodating Jury’s Inn hotel in Hatton Cross, I made some music on my laptop. Lacking instruments, and limited in the amount of noise I was able to make, I composed and recorded everything entirely in software, using the excellent Reaper DAW and a bunch of free instruments and plugins.

The collection of tunes that emerged over this period had some common features: from the beginning, I decided to make music focusing on Harmondsworth Moor, which would evoke both its flourishing flora and fauna and the often wild, wet and windy experience of walking across it. Rather as the black metal artist Striborg establishes rules of mimesis whereby different sonic components of his music correspond to different aspects of the experience of wandering through the forests of his native Tasmania, I started finding ways to produce “blustery” or “burgeoning” sounds using electronic instruments and complex signal chains. My previous experiments with w/trem and (the electronic version of) Spiral Jacobs provided some ready-made techniques for making electronic instruments squall, throb, fuzz and hiss; I also found that arpeggiation gave me a nice musical analogue for the profligate natural self-propagation of bushes and flowers.

You can hear the entire album below – it’s also available as a name-your-price (including “free”) download from the Blackwaterside bandcamp page.