New Release: In a Gallery, in a Grave
I’ve just recently released my first record for three years, a record I’ve been working on for at least five years. It has been a long and rather difficult process, and seeing as the record ended up being released in rather a different form than originally intended, I felt there was more I had to communicate than the music could say by itself. Below is the story of this record, as included on its album page on Bandcamp, where the album can be streamed or downloaded and purchased.
Three instrumental tracks from the would-be third EP of Garden.
The music was composed around 2014-15 (some of its material in fact based on music years older yet) with recording beginning in the Summer of 2015, but without the encouragement and discipline of direct collaborators the project's momentum was allowed to succumb to my fading enthusiasm. By the time I resumed work in earnest (not for the first time) to record my vocals I simply couldn't face it, both in terms of the difficulty of the parts I'd given myself as a very part-time singer, as well as dissatisfaction with the lyrics, which came to symbolise for me my failure to accomplish what I'd originally intended.
This all having been said, I decided to release these songs as instrumentals, and I am finally proud of the results, and very thankful to all of the musicians who contributed their time and ability.
In lieu of vocals I've decided to share a little about each piece and the album as originally intended, as well as a few lines of lyrics.
The original title for the record was 'The Island and I', later shortened to the less pretentious 'Island'. Two of the songs, Pondlife and Via Negativa, were fairly personal, and the other two, Glass Eye and From the Mouth of the City (which I instead released on its own before what I presently assumed to be the record's imminent release) I saw as developments of the previous record Somewhere Else's preoccupation with place and perspective. The title was supposed to reflect these complimentary focuses on the internal and external.
Pondlife is a bit of a childhood memoir of loneliness in spite of company. The lines didn't all quite carry the sufficient irony for me to have felt entirely comfortable singing about "poverty" amidst "property", and I nearly simply rewrote the offending lines, but the whole thing carried a level of naivety, which I might actually have defended as endearing, but in any case I didn't want to finish it that way.
Always most at home with narrow minds and pondlife,
sorry soul, always most alone in crowds,
fleeing from festival sounds.
Via Negativa is a bit of a mirror image of Pondlife, in that it also concerned with loneliness, but rather with the perverse pleasure, earnest or not, taken in being alone. Originally written donkeys years ago (before 2012, to say the least) and titled Soliloquy, it originally opened with the line "Oh God everything", which was a bit of a joke between me and a friend regarding my tendency at the time towards misanthropy in my writing. As Via Negativa, this line returned with its tongue further in its cheek. "Oh God Everything, the sentiment still stands, and yet it's Nothing that stings." All the same, I felt some of the same discomfort when it came to actually singing these lines, rather than simply writing about them.
Should you come, take me alive,
when tiring of I's and my's
I admit that More is More
was the sound I wanted to make.
Glass Eye was originally entitled Still Being, pinched from a poem by Christine De Luca from the Edinburgh literature journal The Evergreen. The poem's subtitle is Heron in the Botanics, and the original inspiration for my own song sprang from a sighting of a heron along the Water of Leith. The lyrics of Glass Eye first describe this sighting, after which the focus moves inward to the seer's experience of looking, remembering, and the gulf between the sensual and the ideal components of absorbing, and expressing.
Along the water's edge
I heard and I held a picture in my head
a negative.
Still gesture of ink and feather
in all the colours I could see.
Upon the riverbank,
an unlikely gallery,
hanged a picture of becoming.
Slowly it came alive
feathers stirring, like spilled light,
a mere glimpse
of momentary eternity.
I went to the island
to retrace the path I drew.
I wanted to watch myself cross the causeway,
but I've been here and I've been here and I've been here and I've been here
Along the water's edge
framed by impatient hands
Upon the riverbank
I elected not to stare into my screen
yet all I have are photographs.
In a gallery, in a grave
strip the peeling paint from the person in those pictures.
He is dead, and I am dying
to become profound.