The rhythm and movement of place: an interview with Jack Cooper

By Dan Carney:

Anyone familiar with Modern Nature’s compelling blend of psych, folk, prog, and pop will know that the band’s main songwriter Jack Cooper draws plenty of inspiration from the rhythms and movements of the places around him. Debut collection ‘How to Live’ explored the transition between the urban and the rural, while last year’s ‘Annual’ beautifully evoked the seasonal cycle. Forthcoming album ‘Island Of Noise’, available via the Bella Union label from November 19th, tells the story of an imagined island; its evolving landscapes, mysteries, and customs, as experienced by an outsider.  

‘Tributaries’, Jack’s recent guitar/saxophone collaboration with band mate Jeff Tobias, consists of two unhurried, minimal pieces inspired by Wicken and Debden Waters, streams that meet the River Cam near his home in Newport, Essex. Spidery note clusters and playful, conversational phrases give way to smooth harmonics and hanging, resonant silences, alternately restless then still. Instruments and melodies unite, separate, and then rejoin, perfectly capturing the babble, flow, and meander of natural streams. The result is one of the most beguiling and vital British experimental/improv releases of recent times. I was lucky enough to ask Jack all about it…

How did ‘Tributaries’ come about?

Over the last few years, I've become more interested in figuring out a language for making music like this - things accelerated when I started to play the trumpet and involve myself more in theory and notating for other musicians. My working relationship and friendship with Jeff has really given me a lot of confidence. His enthusiasm and openness has been inspiring and key to me exploring these different routes.

What did you set out to capture on the record?

It's difficult to explain, but more than anything I've written before, I feel it has achieved something that I'm not really able to articulate with words. I've had some nice messages from people conveying back to me what I think I intended, which is interesting. The intention behind the systems and score is very different from the finished pieces, because the intention there was to capture a conversation between myself and Jeff.

What was it about Wicken Water and Debden Water that inspired the two pieces?

On a surface level, these two bodies of water are fundamentally the same; two streams that feed the River Cam. But they are completely different in every way from one day to the next - depth, speed, the various life contained within - the molecules will probably never pass here again. So these pieces of music are similar in that they're never the same twice, but on a surface level they're the same. I've been making a film, a visual accompaniment to the new Modern Nature record and that's based around shots that highlight order or symmetry within the chaos of the natural world. I think that's something I'm trying to find - order within the chaos.

Jeff has said that the record is “based on systems written by Jack melding composition and improvisation”…

The systems have more in common with geometric patterns, based around what I consider to be a more logical tuning of the guitar. I improvise around them and from that a score is composed over a period of time. The performers devise an interpretation of the score and that's what you're hearing here. For these recordings the systems and then the score are really secondary to our interpretation, in that the aim is exploring a sort of melodic collectivism. The main consideration when performing the score and contributing to the overall work is to consider your own personal interpretation of what 'collectivism' means. If the foundation of the piece and its purpose is the 'main melodic theme' or the 'score', then how does your own interpretation of collectivism fit in with that and what can you contribute towards the end goal? What aspects of the score can your performance highlight, support or compliment and how can your use of rhythm, timbre, harmony and intent serve it best?

It’s evident on this record that you’re influenced by 1960s/70s left-of-centre British jazz/improvised music. Which of these artists are worth checking out, for people who may love Tributaries but not be familiar with them?

The music that has got me the most over the last couple of years is Philip Thomas' collection of Morton Feldman's piano music which came out via Another Timbre. I think the pace of the music made me realise how context is everything. With enough space between them, any two sounds can make sense. They've also just released a collection of John Cage's Number Pieces by Apartment House, which has a similar clarity. 

Are there plans to do more?

Absolutely, this is just the beginning really. First steps perhaps, but I'm currently working on a piece that's more involved in its composition so I'm getting to grips with how best to realise that and where to take it. I'm also working on new Modern Nature music as well and I think the lines between these two strands will probably blur a lot more over time.

How would you compare where you live now to where you were before, around the Wanstead Flats part of Epping Forest? 

It's easier to ignore the city here.

***

‘Tributaries’ album on Bandcamp: https://astributaries.bandcamp.com/album/tributaries 

Pre-order the forthcoming Modern Nature album ‘Island Of Noise’:
https://bellaunion.ochre.store/release/250629-modern-nature-island-of-noise 

***

Dan Carney is a writer, musician, and lecturer from northeast London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also worked in academic psychology research, and has authored articles on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Music and Place: ‘Surface Tension’ by Rob St John

By Paul Scraton:

In 2014 the musician, writer and artist Rob St John set off on a year of walking, recording and photographing the Lea Valley in East London. The project was commissioned by the Thames21 Love the Lea charity in order to document the pollution, life and biodiversity of the Lea Valley’s environment. Out of these explorations Rob took with him to his home studio a mix of field recordings, tape loops of guitar, cello and piano melodies – some even deliberately eroded in river water baths – to create an album of electric-pastoral sounds, haunting and melodic, and deeply rooted in place.

The album was called Surface Tension and it was released in 2015 to much acclaim and quickly sold out its original book and CD limited editions. We have long been fans of Rob’s work in general and Surface Tension in particular, and so we were really excited to hear that 2021 would see the re-release of Surface Tension by Blackford Hill in a limited-edition vinyl package including Rob’s 35mm and 120 film photographs and new sleeve notes by writer Richard King and conservationist Benjamin Fenton. 

Added to this is an essay by Rob on how art, ecology and sound were brought together to create Surface Tension. There are only 300 copies available and each record is pressed on eco-mix vinyl using plastic cut-offs from other pressings. This means that each copy is both visually unique and more environmentally friendly than classic record pressings.

You can find out more about Rob’s work and this special edition of Surface Tension, as well as listen to some of the tracks from the album, on the Blackford Hill website. This special edition was released on Friday 14 May and is sure to sell out quickly, so order your copy soon!

A musical memory journey to West Africa

By Tim Woods:

It’s that warm tropical air with its overpowering scent of damp earthiness. It’s the magnificent birds and their multicoloured costumes, all reds and blues and greens. It’s the sweet relief of that first beer on a sticky evening, sipped from a sweaty bottle with the label sliding off. It’s the music that never seems to stop, whether you’re in a bar, on the beach or on the streets. These things, and so many others, are what I miss about West Africa – now more than ever. 

If the worst that happens to me during this wretched pandemic is an exaggerated case of wanderlust, then I’ll have been exceptionally fortunate. At the same time, I don’t think I’m alone in selfishly shoving larger issues aside and simply longing to escape the flat, the city, the country; in dreaming of other places; in wishing to be elsewhere. 

Last spring, as we all found ourselves adjusting to the unpleasant new reality, my yearning for the region I once called home grew stronger than ever. And so I began to travel virtually to the places I know in West Africa. While it’s not possible to recreate that heat, or redecorate Berlin’s garden birds in snazzier outfits, there are ways to take yourself there. I dug out old photos and sifted through them. I re-read well-thumbed guidebooks, picking out the places where I’d stayed and eaten. And I listened to the music, one of the best ways there is to curb the worst symptoms of travel sickness. 

West Africa has a hugely diverse musical culture, but perhaps the best-known style in Europe is the gentle, harp-like sound of the kora. And there are few kora players better than Sona Jobarteh. Her mastery of the instrument is not just admirable, it is also ground-breaking: she is the first female professional player, breaking into a livelihood that for centuries was solely for men. Born in Britain, but with proud Gambian roots, she comes from a griot family, who pass artistic traditions down through the generations. To truly appreciate the skill involved, it’s worth watching one of her concerts and admiring the speed at which she moves across the kora’s twenty-one strings. 

On a baking day last summer, I sat in the garden, listening once again to her music, hoping to be taken somewhere exotic. This time, I went to Bamako – one advantage of virtual travelling is that it’s easy to skip from Gambia to Mali in the blink of an eye – and specifically the San Toro restaurant, an oasis of calm in the chaos of that relentless city. One evening there, during a work trip to Mali, I ate falafel and drank peppermint tea from a clay cup while enjoying the sound of the kora. To my untrained ear, no songs ever seemed to start or finish, but instead the music drifted wherever the resident artist felt like going. I was even honoured with an exclusive performance: as the only customer, he was playing just to me. It felt a little indulgent, but he didn’t seem at all put out. When I left two hours later, he simply carried on. I’m not even sure he noticed me going.

Music has an unrivalled ability to take us somewhere else, often being strongly associated with certain points in our lives. It’s not just West Africa; I cannot listen to the Seekers without recalling family holidays spent driving around a rain-sodden Lake District, while any Britpop song will instantly take me to the clubs of Sheffield and my student days. It’s a welcome bonus to loving music, providing instant happy reminders of another place or time. 

Only since our ability to travel has been so severely restricted have I begun to use it actively, though. Only now, being indefinitely grounded in Berlin, do I feel a need to play this trick on myself. And, for the first time, I am starting to wonder if travelling will ever be as straightforward as it once was. I fear it may have been irreversibly damaged, whether due to the still ongoing Covid-19, or whatever virus nature has in store for us next; or maybe due to the now unavoidable climate crisis placing further, necessary, limits to our wanderings. 

It could, more simply and personally, be because that carefree period of my life is now over. I last visited West Africa on a work trip to Senegal in 2018, and back then I never once thought it would be three years and counting before I was back. My time spent living in Ghana is now nearly a decade ago, and those determined plans to return are getting hazier with each passing year. Fortunately I can go back easily enough, with a little help from the music; I just hope that I won’t need to use that trick forever.

***

Tim is an editor on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Love In The Time of Britpop. You’ll find him on Twitter here.

Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

By Paul Scraton:

Sometime around 2011 or 2012 I was in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, browsing the shelves of the Grove Bookshop. There, in a section devoted to nature writing and the outdoors, I found a slender volume called The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. This book, written around the end of the Second World War and first published in 1977, has become a touchstone of landscape and place writing in the decade or so since Canongate published it in a new edition with an introduction from Robert Macfarlane. It has been translated into a number of different languages and its author, who died in 1981, now graces the Scottish five-pound note. Quite the result for a book that had sat, quietly in a drawer, for more than three decades after Shepherd wrote it.

In the Canongate edition, The Living Mountain is only just over a hundred pages long, and yet within that short space Shepherd creates a richly detailed portrait of a place that was so important to her throughout her life – the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. If I remember correctly, I read it in one evening at my mum’s house in Menston, and as so often happens with a book like this, it became connected in my imagination not only to the place it is actually about, but also the place where I read it.

I don’t know the Cairngorms very well. I have only been to that corner of Scotland a couple of times, both in childhood, and so I cannot be sure if my memories of the landscape are real, or based on other sources, not least Shepherd’s wonderfully descriptive prose. But picking up the book again this week, I found myself reminded not only of the Scottish landscapes I have known, but also the moors above my mum’s house and the walks we took during that visit nearly ten years ago, with Shepherd’s words still echoing around my head.

Indeed, it is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to The Living Mountain is that a piece of writing so deeply connected to and rooted in a specific place, can have such resonance with someone who has nearly no personal experience of it. Perhaps it is because all of us who love the outdoors have our own version of what Shepherd felt when she walked out once more into the Cairngorms. For us it might be the Welsh hills or the Baltic coast, a Yorkshire moor or a Brandenburg forest, but we understand Shepherd’s depth of feeling because we feel it too. 

The cover artwork of ‘The Living Mountain’, the new album by Jenny Sturgeon, photo by Hannah Bailey

What is true of books is even more true of music. There are so many songs and albums that are connected in my brain to a certain moment, a time of my life and a particular place. A youth hostel room in Slovenia, the snow falling at the window. A border-crossing in Switzerland, in the middle of the night. A road trip through Spain and the volcanic landscapes of Cabo de Gata. Of course, these songs are not about those places, but they became forever linked with them in my imagination. So I was intrigued to see what happened when I listened to a new album by the singer-songwriter Jenny Sturgeon, who has written and recorded her own The Living Mountain, a collection of songs inspired by Nan Shepherd’s book.

As well as the album, released earlier this month, there will also be accompanying films by Shona Thomson which will be hopefully toured next year, and Sturgeon has also found time to record The Living Mountain Podcast, a series of conversations with artists, writers and ecologists about their own connections with the mountains, outdoor places and how they inspire and influence their work.

It often feels, with projects like this, that the great test of the work of art inspired by another is whether it can stand up on its own right. And while it is certainly true that, listening to Jenny Sturgeon’s songs with Nan Shepherd’s book at your elbow, it is easy to hear the conversation between them, the strength of The Living Mountain (the album) is that the songs work in and of themselves. It was a long time since I’d read the book when I first listened to Sturgeon’s album, and what I heard was something poetic, beautiful and haunting, and I think this would have been the case even if I had never read Shepherd’s work at all. 

At the end of Sturgeon’s podcast episodes she asks her guests if they have a piece of music that connects them to the landscapes and places they have been talking about in their conversation. The greatest compliment I can give The Living Mountain as an album is that I have continued to hear it, echoing in my head as Nan Shepherd’s prose did before, long after the album has finished and I’ve left the house to go for a walk by the river or in the woods. Something tells me that Sturgeon’s voice and songs will be with me for a long time, and will take me back to these autumn days in Berlin and Brandenburg, forever linked to this particular time and these particular places. It’s quite a way from the high plateau of the Cairngorms to the flatlands of northeastern Germany, but for this listener at least, they are now connected through the words and music of Jenny Sturgeon. 

***

You can find out more about Jenny Sturgeon and the Living Mountain project, including the podcast, on her website. The album was released in October 2020 by Hudson Records. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is published by Canongate. Order it through your local independent bookshop.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His next book, In the Pines, is a novella about a lifelong connection to the forest and will be published by Influx Press in 2021.

Podcast: Folk on Foot

By Sara Bellini

“I have forgotten the cold” repeats Nancy Kerr in a song about the ragwort with its “crown of gold” and the cinnabar moth whose life entirely depends on it. It is a song “about climate, about weather and about love”. Her words particularly resonated with me this winter that feels unjustly deprived of cold. 

Later on she talks about the link between nature writing and writing folk songs, the stories that folk musicians carry with them and the landscape that is one with these stories. The beauty of nature and the concept of communality, of sharing the same piece of Earth and looking after it together, appreciating it, being part of it. 

The conversation between singer-songwriter Nancy Kerr and host Matthew Bannister reminded me again why I listen to Folk on Foot. Because through this podcast you get to know folk musicians in their own words and at the same time you walk with them in the places all over the UK that inspire them and they call home. For example you find out that Peggy Seeger has an apple tree in her garden in Iffley and the locals pick the fruits and make apple juice out of it, which sounds just lovely. 

The episode I referenced earlier (and you can find at the top of this post) followed Nancy Kerr along the Kennet and Avon Canal and coming soon in this Season 4 is Frank Turner. In the real world, footage from various podcast recordings will be shown by Matthew Bannister himself at King’s Place, London, on the 14th of March. The Wild Singing weekend is part of the Nature Unwrapped series and features performances by folk musicians and environmentally inspired artists, so have a look at the programme and ticket availability. Meanwhile, as usual, be nice to the bees.  

Wild Singing
Folk on Foot  

Waiting Rooms: A short documentary

Three years ago, Samantha Whates decided she wanted to record her latest album away from the confines of a recording studio, preferring instead to take her music to everyday places and record the songs there. Following her progress over two years and six unusual recording sessions, this short film by Julius Beltrame & edited by Sam Errington is a small glimpse inside that journey, and a tribute to Samantha's unique achievement.

We’ve also been following Samantha’s progress in the making of this album, and you can read about some of the sessions here on Elsewhere.

New Music: Daylight Savings, by Samantha Whates

An apt title for a new release from Samantha Whates this Monday morning, as we are extremely pleased to share the video for Samantha’s single ‘Daylight Savings’. Observant readers of Elsewhere will know Samantha as we have been following her in the process of recording the album ‘Waiting Rooms’, which will be released next month.

All the tracks on ‘Waiting Rooms’ were written and recorded in a series of waiting rooms, some active and some abandoned, in railway and bus stations, hospitals, ferry ports and care homes. The album, which we are very much looking forward to, will address themes of loss and waiting, of transition and of time passing in transient spaces.

The song ‘Daylight Savings’ was recorded live in the golden hour of early autumn 2018 in the abandoned, Grade II Listed Old Waiting Room in Peckham Rye Station. The waiting room opened in 1865 but has been closed since 1961, and after some serious time and effort, Samantha was allowed in to record the song. It was worth it. In Samantha’s own words: “Daylight Savings captures that space and the light more than any other song on the album could’ve - that room was made for recording classical instrument and voice and I am honoured to have been able to make a recording in that room. I am not sure that will happen again.”

Samantha Whates – Waiting Rooms – Released 1 November on WONDERFUL SOUND

About the music video for Daylight Savings:
Arr. by Rhia Parker.
Directed by Samantha Whates
Compositor - Dylan White
Animation Supervisor - Simon Lambert
Special thanks to Sandringham Primary School for use of equipment :)
Featuring
Recorder - Rhia Parker & Danielle Jalowiecka
Cello - Tara Franks
Recording & Engineer - Douglas Whates

Waiting Rooms by Samantha Whates - Part II: Loughton

Singer and songwriter Samantha Whates is writing and recording her forthcoming album entirely on location in a series of waiting rooms, some active, some abandoned, trains, buses, hospitals, ferries, care homes. The album will address themes of loss and waiting, of transition and of time passing in transient spaces

Dylan White, who has worked with Samantha on the project will be writing a series of posts for the Elsewhere blog from the different locations of the recording sessions. The second of the series takes us to an overnight recording in an art deco waiting room at the end of a tube line:

Underground 

It’s hard to believe Samantha ever recorded in here. Sneaked in after hours by game TFL staff and adrenalin. A four piece band, recording engineer and filmmaker. Laden. A full kit. Ad hoc power supply daisy chained up the steps from the opposite platform office. The bash of drums reverberating around this tiny glass and brick quadrangle in the dead of night and rain, as empty ghost trains howled past the station windows throughout. The first time music has been recorded live on the network, and perhaps not completely legally so let's hurry past the specifics.  

In her own estimation it’s not her strongest take. She can hear the cold and the wet and the hour in her vocal. For me it’s everything this project is and more. It’s hard. It’s brave. It’s exposing. It’s romantic as hell sure but it’s real. And cold. And stinks of people, both real and imagined.

This is a haunting, harrowing recording in an oddly beautiful, austere, Art Deco station on the very periphery of the city limits. Suburbia. Commuter belt. A twin hulled concrete spaceship perched precariously atop the perimeter. Ballardian dreams of hope and regret. The constant rumble of those empty commuter trains full of broken dreams is audible, rolling in and out throughout.

Recording this album has been an adventure, inhabiting and reinterpreting sometime public spaces in a totally honest and genuine way. On arrival here there was no power supply and the damp stench of it. Frankly it’s a horrible place. And it still stinks of piss. But that’s London, and that's real life. Imbued with stark lines, crittal windows and the utopian ideas of the 30’s, joined by a filthy dimplex heater maybe 50 years later, it’s grilled cover charred and warped. Someone’s twitter handle scrawled on with a marker pen perhaps 30 years later still. 

How many people have sat right here? How many countless mornings of thought, apprehension, worry, elation have people sat and lived on these municipal wooden benches. No one seems to use these waiting rooms anymore. Are we too busy. Are the trains too frequent. Do we ever just stop to think, to wait. Does anybody have time, or inclination, patience. We poke and prod our lives away, cloying away the time. Averting our gaze. Avoiding the inevitable.

Perhaps it’s me they’re avoiding. The dishevelled guy taking photos of heaters, riding the rails like a zone 6 hobo. It’s nice out here. The carriages are mostly empty, the windows wide angle panorama of rolling fields and woods call to me, as I scan for birds and big cats, idly transecting the m25 like the psychogeographer of cliche.

Dylan White’s website / twitter
Samantha Whates on twitter