Ian Hawgood - 彼方 (Part One) (2019)

'彼方' is an album of outtakes from my 2018 release '光'.

I had the working title of 'Beyond' whilst recording the initial sketches but came to tie the album together with a common theme of my work, namely that of 'light'. This always seemed the most fitting as it followed on from my last solo album 'The Shattered Light' as a personal and musical experience.

After finding myself caught between making a fairly direct piano album or a pure ambient album at the time, I instead chose to focus on the noise of my dustier and more broken reels in the final album itself, as it made more sense thematically but also it just felt like the most natural way to record the pieces at the time.

Whilst I typically reuse reels and tapes once I have transferred and completed the work, for some reason I found myself listening to the multitude of recordings that had built the project and came to the conclusion that the various developmental stages in the recording of the album itself had a life of their own, separate from the eventual release.

'彼方' translates as 'distant place / land' as well as 'beyond' really, and I always felt the more ambient work here had an ethereal type of quality compared to the final cut's more earthy nature.

Part One is a mix of the recordings I took before editing the final reels on one of my noisy Revox's and whilst these were the pieces that didn't make it to the final release, I feel they come together in their own way to make something of a very different nature, despite being of the same instrument and process source.

Part Two was when I was originally working on a pure ambient album, increasing the use of the piano tail (decay) as I edited the reel loops. Although it was noted upon release that the original album was a mix of piano and synths in some quarters, it actually wasn't at all. All of the work involved piano being recorded onto a wall of various reel-to-reels and editing from them without any other instruments added. Part Two is literally just cutting out the piano attack and taking my merry old time splicing tape, running through the machines over and over again, and coming out with a very large sounding ambient work which I really am very proud of in its own right. - Ian Hawgood