Mote Music

I’m very happy to be releasing a new album, Mote Music on December 4th 2020. The album, is in many respects a consolidation of two years worth of activities, experiments, ruminations and encounters with sound and the wider environment.

A pre-release track, “Apophenia” is currently streaming at Soundcloud and at Bandcamp, where the album is now available for pre-order.

You can read the liner notes below, the opening quote is from Olivia Laing’s wonderful travelogue To The River:

You don’t have to be a poet to be prone to ‘apophenia’, seeking meaningful patterns in the scattered, senseless data of the everyday. In a certain mood, the Earth itself can seem like a ouija board, calling out its advice, discarding symbol and after symbol, relentless and malevolent, though to ordinary eyes nothing more has happened than a single black and white bird winging down the sky. 

– Olivia Laing, To The River 

Mote Music is an album of impressions. The compositions are deeply personal reflections that the listener is invited to bring their own unique interpretation to. 

Apophenia, when applied to the realm of listening, renders sound amorphous, evading categorisation or becoming affixed to particular objects, actions or spaces. Unless the sounds are readily identifiable – such as the cascade of water, a rumble of an engine, twitter of birds, murmur of a crowd – the listener is presented with an impression of an environment in which they are invited to make connections, find meaning and construct their own world. 

The track titles originate from personal encounters with sound and place. Like the compositions, they provide an indefinite starting point for the listener: “Place Is Always Moving”, “Galaxias”, “Apophenia”, “Why Blue?”, “Clearing A Path”, “Yugen”, “Sky Country” and “Impermanent Year”. 

Although sounds of water, birdsong, human voices and technology feature across the compositions, they have been arranged, layered and harmonised with each other, in such a manner so as to obscure their original form. In this respect, the album is presented as a tableau of trace marks, artefacts and residues. 

As the listener, perhaps you may experience this album through the small speakers of a laptop or a phone; a pair of headphones; through a portable speaker in the kitchen or shower; in a car; or on a hi-fi system in a living room. All of these and other modes of reception and listening are encouraged to appreciate this album, with perhaps the sole recommendation that you listen at a relatively quiet volume to permit the surrounding ambience of your environment to interplay, weave and swirl around Mote Music. 

Tristan Louth-Robins, November 2020