candlesnuffer - apsomeophone (2021/2005)

‘apsomeophone’ grew out of love for and, from a listener's point of view, an historical immersion in a tight group of compositions by musique concréte, film soundtrack and Twentieth Century Classical composers. These listening experiences became entwined, at some stage, with my own ponderings round a desire to compose a group of very personally suited recordings, to be utilised in a live context as a proxy ensemble accompaniment to my slowly blossoming and evolving prepared guitar techniques.

Through a compositional process that I would loosely describe as ‘aural sculpture’, I extracted snippets of sound and short musical passages from these adored compositions (the list of composers borrowed from includes Béla Bartók, John Cage, Pierre Henry, György Ligeti, Tōru Takemitsu and Edgard Varése). These small sonic extractions I then processed heavily, augmented spatially and timbrally and began to arrange into fragmented groupings, making correlations pleasing to my ear. This transfigurative process became a long drawn out undertaking, soon enriched and complicated by the systematic and responsive addition of other fragmentary sounds generated through the use of my own guitars, stringed instruments and electronics. And…., on the layering and editing went as I meandered towards a final point of sonic sculptural satisfaction. As a group of odes, each of the final compositions on ‘apsomeophone’ focuses on one or two of the aforementioned, inspirational listening antecedents.

Fifteen years later, the compositions throughout ‘apsomeophone’ still hold a warm grip on me and, though distant timewise, I still feel saturated with all the minutiae of the compositional processes, a feeling akin to being immersed in a supportive body of warm water. It’s a record that I’m really attached to and remain entwined with to the point where the working methods which gestated there have become the norm for me. It’s a heavily pored over record, where somehow nothing is out of place, and I believe it’s a record loosely in the mode of its predecessors.