Superclusters debut album out now via Hobbledehoy Records
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Interactive album companions: evil pond + meth forest
Bree van Reyk (vibraphone, drums, crotales), Véronique Serret - (violin), Mick Turner (electric guitar), Evan Mannell (drums), Zoe Hauptmann (upright bass), Ben Hauptmann (electric guitar), Jess Green (electric guitar), Nick Wales (viola), Jason Noble (bass clarinet), Sandy Evans (saxophones), Freya Schack-Arnott (‘cello), Timothy Constable (vibraphone), Joshua Hill (marimba, crotales), The Letter String Quartet: Lizzy Welsh (violin), Steph O’Hara (violin), Biddy Connor (viola), Zoë Barry (‘cello).
The subtitle for this track is 'falling in and out of an evil pond'. It feels to me like a seemingly endless and expansive void - dark, but not desolate; vast, but not isolating. There's something heavy floating in an unknown, deep, and ever evolving space. This kind of thick, heavy air is gradually infiltrated by dust and ants, busy little small beings and their breaths. At the same time blooms of light are glimpsed, their warmth felt from a distance, and we move into a temporality where the same component parts are now holding us in memories of light.
In writing each of the parts that make up Superclusters my aim was simply to start from where the previous part had ended and see what would happen next through listening and improvisation. What eventuates as a composition (piece/part/track) is arrived at through a repeated practice of firstly finding a mode of sound-making that feels like the right thing to do at the time, then listening and finding the sounds that feel like the right thing to do next, to infinity. I want to establish semi-static sonic spaces and explore what is around the edges of them - what is hiding, what is emerging, what is next along the pathway.
After roughly mapping out the component parts of the composition using words, dots and lines on pieces of paper, and sometimes telling anecdotes about bees and democratic systems, or different kinds of light, water, dust etc I invited a bunch of my closest friends and collaborators to join me in the process of listening, and then playing what they felt was the right thing to play at the time. This overall process was done over a period of months and years, but each of the musicians only performed one or two takes of each piece in any given recording session. The end result is dozens of spontaneous responses to whatever had previously been recorded - the sounds of highly skilled and beautifully creative sound-makers navigating the pathways if each composition with just enough information to find their way through.
The bedrock of part II, as with most other parts of the album, was created in an initial recording session with myself and violinist, Véronique Serret. We had been working on some quasi-improvised duo material together based on exploded/atomised renditions of 16th and 17th century western art music ('early music' and baroque). Véronique and I have been friends and musical colleagues for many years and have both built hybrid musical careers which span from experimental, pop, improvisation, orchestral and contemporary art music practices. After putting down the first layer with vibraphone and violin the next layer was probably the most fun one for me because I got to sit opposite one of my favourite drummers and people, Evan Mannell, while we smashed out some very loud and energetic double drums at each other. Most of the reverb you can hear in the drums was recorded via mic'ing up the concrete stairwell next to the recording room, and most of the energy you can hear is me trying to keep up with Evan's massively punchy sound : )
Having Mick Turner and Jim White be part of Superclusters is like a very far-fetched dream coming true for me. They are both total heroes of mine and I've seen them play together and separately more times than I can count. They each count amongst my very favourite instrumentalists of all time. Jim and I had been talking for years about doing something together and I somehow managed to get him into the studio on the eve of the pandemic last year. I sent Mick the tracks-in-progress and he was into them and kind enough to record some of his beautiful heartbreak-electric-guitar-of-my-dreams on a few tracks in his home studio during the first lockdown of 2020. Despite the definitively un-romantic nature of digital file transfer, I'll never forget the experience of hearing Mick's guitar on those tracks for the first time, and I definitely cried a fair bit at the joy of hearing his completely original and beautiful playing on my music. Mick's guitar playing has always blown my mind in the way that he plays lead, bass and beautiful background textures all at the same time, but in some kind of magical way where it's completely supportive of everything else around, and not dominant in the way guitars often can be. Although I'd given all the other musicians a very open brief in terms of their musical contributions, and had always fostered a very free approach, I was still there in the room giving feedback and directions to varying degrees to shape the music into my aesthetic and pre-conceived inklings of how things could go. But with Mick, aside from sending a few brief notes about the compositions, I wasn't part of his performance or recording process, so hearing what he'd played was really wondrous and exciting and he pushed and pulled things into directions that I hadn't imagined.