Music in colour

I’ve been intending to make a more ambient album for some time. While working on another music project recently, I started thinking about how nature evolves, preserves, protects and destroys, and what kind of music could work with that concept. And right there, I had the starting point for a new album project.

Firstly, I set myself some specific restrictions in which to work – no drums or percussion, no crazy bass lines and distinctive lead riffs. I wanted to make something expansive and flowing, with an organic feel to it. Something more exposed, raw and spontaneous.

Our emotions often feel at one and in-tune with the natural world around us, so I wanted to make something that might feel right to listen to when out walking through woodlands or countryside, just as much as it may be something more personal and reflective – and reflection is something we do more easily when we have that natural open space just to ourselves; those moments where we can experience a calm sense of time passing and be at one with our thoughts and memories.

I felt it was imperative to find specific sounds that added different textures to the music, such as you would find in nature – warm, cold, wet, dry, smooth or coarse.

I had been discussing the project with my friend Richard Hayes, who was again tasked with writing an introduction for the album. And during our exchange of emails, the phrase that became the album’s title happened to appear – Remnants From A Lost Time.

However, one of the main influences behind this project was synaesthesia. My synaesthesia has become a crucial part of my creative process, whether I'm creating art or music, although it is perhaps more profound when working on music.

When I'm composing something – which is usually improvised – I think in colours and textures. I might want a "blue" sound or a "yellow" tone, or something that sounds – or feels – like gravel os cool marble. This whole menagerie of colours, forms and textures plays out in my mind, and while it is unlikely to be evident to most of my listeners, for me, that association between sound and colour is a vital part of the process.

I wanted to work with green sounds and earthy textures, to match the natural environment which underpinned the album concept that was also inspiring the music.

With that in mind, for the album artwork, I set about painting some abstract art whilst listening to my own work-in-progress, which resulted in a series of pieces, which ultimately became the cover art.

Remnants From A Lost Time is available now via Bandcamp.

Traces: the cover design

With just a day to go before I unleash my new album, Traces - almost a year in the making - I thought I'd explain my thinking behind the cover design.

The basic concept of Traces is that of dreams and memories – and their convergence in our subconscious. A common dream theme is the sea, which has often been described by dream analysts as the transition between the conscious and subconscious. It has also been suggested that a dream of the sea, water, waves, etc is representative of our emotions.

I’ve certainly had dreams in such an environment, and it was also a recurring setting in some of the books I was reading whilst making the album. And who hasn't felt totally at ease and relaxed when staring out into the sea? All of this made me think more and more that the album artwork needed to be a sea view.

It’s the first photographic album cover I’ve done in a while – and long overdue. Initially I had planned an entirely black cover with just the ‘TRACES’ lettering, and similarly typographic artwork for the booklet, leaving it completely open to interpretation. But the more the music evolved, the less I felt a black cover would represent it. I wanted muted colours and something dreamy. Plus, as a synaesthete, it was important at least to me, to get the 'colours' right across both the cover and the music!

After looking through my own photographs, I settled on one particular shot, which had just the right composition. I worked on the colouring for a subtle effect, with hues that in my mind matched the music. Through the colouring, I wanted to give an ordinary scene, just that gentle hint of something extraordinary.

Many of the images I used in the rest of the artwork convey the reflective and nostalgic mood of the album, but in a slightly more detached way. I had been experimenting with a video for the title track using some old archive film footage that made a nice juxtaposition with the music. So I took stills of these as complimentary images.

Traces will be available from Bandcamp on CD and MP3 from 3rd March 2014.