Inspiration

A New Album, Part Two: The Music

| Forgotten Fields

This is part two of a three-part series about the new self-titled album. Read “A New Album, Part One: The Poem”, here.

“Verse One”, the first track from the self-titled album.

Six Verses, Six Tracks

I started work on the music as soon as the theme of the poem became clear. Already in December 2016, I had put together a collection of sketches, early experiments with melodies and instrumentation based on the direction the poetry was taking. When at last I had the final draft of the poem, I turned my attention to the sketches. I began by deciding which of them to develop into complete tracks, focusing on the ideas that were most in line with the poetry; and since there were six verses, I conceived of an album with six tracks: a series of movements to correspond with the verses of the poem.

The poem played a central role in the writing of the music and the naming the tracks. As with The Zephyr and the Swallow, where the poetry inspired the music and the tracks took their titles directly from the lines, I looked to the verses to inform my creative decisions. I therefore followed in the compositions where the poem led. I named each track after the number of the verse it described, which resulted in the sequential “Verse One”, “Verse Two”, “Verse Three”, and so on. This helped reinforce the track-verse connection and emphasised the importance of the poetry.

The tracklist of the Forgotten Fields album.
The tracklist of the Forgotten Fields album.

Composing the Music

Like the verses, each track went through scores of rewrites as I wrestled with track form, instrumentation and melodies. I would spend days on an idea only to discard it and then reintroduce it later. Two of the tracks changed structure in addition to receiving brand new parts as late as the final mixing phase! Often, things I thought were cast in stone, had to be altered or abandoned for the sake of a better solution. There were countless interpretations of melodies and renditions of musical phrases, each experimenting with different instrumentation and degrees of embellishment or simplification.

All the while, I had to be vigilant not to overcomplicate the music because I wanted to retain an ambient quality. For this reason, it was important to tread the fine line between “soundscape” and “soundtrack”—how much compositional drama could I use before the music stopped being “ambient”?—the goal was to stay faithful to the poetry without being overly descriptive or orchestral. I tried to achieve this by using only a handful of instruments, relying on minimal compositions to bring the melodies to life. The music, therefore, does its best to sweep one along with the simplest instrumentation.

Producing the Album

Building the music around the poem brought a natural cohesion to the album. As the tracks progressed, the scenes, thoughts and emotions conveyed in the lines slowly emerged in the music. Gradually, the compositions began to reflect the substance of the poetic verses, the sketches becoming with every revision the lyrical pieces I had envisioned, months before. The main themes I set to woodwinds, keyboards and guitars, and accompanied them with synthesisers and strings. The result is a vivid expression of the lines of the poem, the music wistful and musing with moments of joy and regret.

Once the compositions were complete, recording went smoothly. The album is a combination of digital and real instruments. For the latter, I worked with session musicians, artists with an intuitive understanding of what I was trying to achieve and consequently, how their parts needed to be played. I decided to use real instruments, especially for the flutes and English Horn because there are nuances in woodwinds that are difficult to reproduce digitally. Working with session musicians brought home to me the beauty of the real instrument and I am convinced that the recordings are better for it.

Read “A New Album, Part Three: The Artwork”, next. Forgotten Fields will be released on 17 November 2017.

A New Album, Part One: The Poem

| Forgotten Fields
The rural beauty of the Western Cape of South Africa, the inspiration behind my work.
The rural beauty of the Western Cape (South Africa) inspires my music and poetry.

Rural Inspiration

Over the past few months, I have been working on a new album. It began at about the same time as my collaboration with Krzyzis in late 2016. Early on, I knew that both projects would share a theme and have a similar concept. These were first explored in The Zephyr and the Swallow—the collaborative EP with Krzyzis—a combination of poetry and ambient music inspired by my love for the countryside. The EP was built around a couplet, a short poem of two lines I wrote to inspire the music; but for the album, I wanted to expand on the idea and write a larger work, a series of verses for a ballad.

The Zephyr and the Swallow EP illustrated a pastoral scene—the wind blows over a field and a swallow dashes into the sky—an idyllic moment of beauty set in a rural landscape. In my youth, at the height of summer, I would spend hours in the fields watching the wind making waves in the grass and the swallows flying overhead. Even now, I find this simple pastime a most enchanting and vivid experience. It is just such a scene I describe in the couplet I wrote for The Zephyr and the Swallow—“Over the field the zephyr blew, / Into the sky the swallow flew”—lines I set to music to create an ode.

Writing the Poem

I started writing the poem for the album in late 2016, going through numerous drafts until I eventually found a form and approach that felt appropriate. In much the same way one agonises over the notes of a musical composition, one pores over a poem—every syllable of every word carefully chosen to exquisitely articulate a meaning or express an emotion. After three months of assembling and dismantling verses, I finally produced “Forgotten Fields”, a self-titled ballad with six verses. In the poem, a daydreamer nostalgically recalls a happy moment in time, surrounded by fields and swallows.

Central to the theme of the poem is the feeling of wistfulness—a longing tinged with regret—conveyed by the imagery. It describes a world of endless fields, swallows impossible to catch, a memory forgotten and rediscovered. The lines are gentle and flowing—the musings of someone lost in thought. They are beautifully read by English narrator Chris Lateano for the compact disc release. “Forgotten Fields”, the all-encompassing title, is alluded to in the final verse:

Far away and left untrodden
Under summer skies
Lie the fields I had forgotten
Where the swallow flies!

This is part one of a three-part series about the new self-titled album. Read part two, “A New Album, Part Two: The Music”, next. Forgotten Fields will be released on 17 November 2017.

The Zephyr and the Swallow

| Forgotten Fields

The Zephyr and the Swallow

A collaboration

I am a Krzyzis fan—pronounced “kr-zh-iz-uh-s” (“zh” as in “azure”) or alternatively, “crisis”. When I first heard Sustainability (2016), I knew that I wanted to work with him. There is a rawness about his music, a sound I admire that does not come to me naturally. Krzyzis creates deep, dark, droning soundscapes whilst I have shifted my focus to tranquil, quiet and tuneful compositions. His melodies are subtle and spectral, whilst mine are distinct and expository. In a collaboration, I saw the perfect opportunity to borrow his genius and in The Zephyr and the Swallow, our two approaches come together.

A meditation

Living in the Overberg, a predominantly rural region in the Western Cape province of South Africa, I am surrounded by vast stretches of countryside. There are mountains, rivers, valleys and hills, but my imagination has always been captured by the fields. They are like oceans of grass that change colour with the seasons. Early in life, I learned to appreciate their beauty and in an attempt to express my admiration, I turned to poetry and music.

The idea of using these two art forms for this purpose took shape around the time I first spoke to Krzyzis about my vision for new music in 2016. I had in mind a project that would take advantage of the unique opportunity track titles presented for poetic exploration. I wanted to treat them as lines of verse and set their poetic content to music to create a vignette of rural beauty, a meditation on a pastoral theme, and so the collaboration was born.

An ode

For this reason, the project began with poetry. The lines had to be descriptive and of a contemplative nature, setting the tone for the music whilst also functioning as track titles. I drew inspiration from traditional Chinese music where the titles often have an illustrative, even lyrical, quality. Examples of these are “Fei Hua Dian Cui (Floating Petals Decorating the Green Leaves)” and “Ping Sha Luo Yan (Wild Geese Descend on the Smooth Sand)”.

Filled with a Romantic adoration for the pastoral, I turned to a poem by Richard Adams in Watership Down in which he describes the wind blowing over the grass. It brought to mind the summer when barn swallows visit the Cape from Britain. They dash across the fields, diving into the grass to catch insects disturbed by the breeze. The grass itself blows like waves in the wind, full of movement yet strangely restful.

I perceive in such imagery a visceral beauty and wanted to reproduce it in verse; and so the EP was conceived as an ode, an ambient idyll in verse and music, celebrating the loveliness of a fleeting, familiar moment in the countryside. With this in mind, I wrote The Zephyr and the Swallow—a simple verse describing a simple scene in simple language:

Over the field the zephyr blew,
Into the sky the swallow flew.

A synthesis

The music became an extension of the verse and in spirit illustrates the scene with melody, mood and lyric content, attempting to preserve in a soundscape the transience, tranquillity and ordinariness of the moment. It drew from the verse not only its theme but also its character, including the addition of vocals—for in describing the EP as an ode and having written a lyrical poem, setting the words to music followed almost naturally.

The verse also inspired the simplicity of the composition and its arrangement. We went so far as to remove the strings I had written, once Krzyzis delivered the pad sections. They rendered strings superfluous, perfectly occupying that space and providing the obbligato part of the instrumentation. His drones rise and fall like the wind, gently transporting the narrative tunes upon textured echoes, sweeping the music along.

Thank you

It has been a wonderful experience working on this project with Krzyzis. We hope you enjoy the outcome as much as we did the production and I wish to thank everyone who made this project possible, namely: Krzyzis for his mesmerising drones and generosity, Lofthill for his creativity and incredible voice, Taylor Deupree for his insight and mastering expertise, Mike Langman for his exquisite illustration of the swallow, and everyone who will hear this music for their quiet contemplation.

The Zephyr and the Swallow is available on all music platforms, including Apple Music and Spotify.