The eight tracks that make up Prolegomenon were created on the train between Northampton and London, using Buzz on an old IBM ThinkPad. (Most of Cold World was written on the same journey, using the same laptop). My initial intention was to make a series of preparatory sketches for a “real” black metal album, complete with obligatory churning guitars and anguished shrieking. I wanted to try out a musical idiolect incorporating minimalist ideas, to fashion a kind of “unholy minimalism” drawing on the techniques of composers like Arvo Part..

This turned out to be one of those ambitions that you learn from by not achieving them. Very quickly I became less interested in the musical grammar of minimalism, and more interested in making Buzz produce evil noises. One thing that Buzz is especially good at is assembling large and complicated effects chains, often splitting off in different directions to be recombined further down the line. Prolegomenon takes some fairly vanilla software synth presets and puts them through the digital wringer: filtering, modulating and distorting until the artifacts from the effects processing start to take over from the original signal.

It’s easy, with that sort of technology, to produce “extreme” noises, heavy on the fuzz and squall; but what I found more interesting was the process of taking a very pure and airless digital composition and corroding it, degrading the signal rather than vamping it into the red. This is probably the only really significant sense in which Prolegomenon adheres to a black metal aesthetic: it aims at a “necro” sound, a soiled and grotty aural signature. Here and there it blazes and howls, of course, but the mood of the sequence is really set by its rasps and tremors, its distant and ominous growlings.

If there’s a take-away message to go with the album, it’s this: commuting makes you feel like shit. Now that I’ve stopped, I can’t imagine producing anything quite like it again. All the same, I’m proud to have used my time between-places creatively and articulately, to have found something to say about the experience. I hope that it evokes for the listener something of the sense of claustrophobia and helplessness that comes with being stuck on an overcrowded train for somewhere around 13% of one’s waking hours every working day - but also something else: the fascination of investigating a sonic space, redeeming the time by dedicating it to artistic investigation, making something of it, and publishing that something for others to experience and perhaps even enjoy.