This semester I made a record that is informed by my experiences over the past year. It’s titled ‘Inside/Outside’, taken from the name of the second track on the EP. That piece was the last thing I recorded at ECA, before the shutdown of the building and my subsequent move back home to Glasgow.
Standing in a stairwell, in front of an out of tune, in places broken, piano; I began improvising around a repeating third that began to swell in volume in relation to the sounds of an ambulance siren outside – a precursor to the coming months.
The longer works on the record, ‘Background Pressure’ and ‘Impressing Strangers’, are diaristic/confessional pieces that are composed from various recordings I’ve made at home and out walking. The pieces deal with dichotomies of comfort and domesticity, with feelings of paranoia and exhaustion. They grapple, as I have, with notions of gender, voice and embodiment.
The final piece, ‘Posture’, is built up from a recording of a cargo ship’s distress signal that sounded loud enough to be heard from my bedroom window, 8 miles away from where it was docked. The sounding of the alarm was a malfunction and the ship was safely docked the entire time. However, until reading this in the news, I’d had no idea what the ominous yet somewhat soothing drone had been the night before. Conceptually I was really interested in the connotations of a distress signal’s sonics as well as its inherent musicality. I improvised around it using an FM synthesiser, creating little motifs and responses that formed a moment of stasis – a suspension that was optimistic yet restrained.
You can listen to the record in full on Bandcamp. I am using the opportunity of its release to raise money for UK charity Mermaids. Mermaids continue to carry out vital, life-changing and life-saving work for Transgender, Non-Binary and Gender Non-Conforming young people and their families. For more information, please visit their website: mermaidsuk.org.uk
