Tullis Rennie - Fixed Freedoms (2022)

Tullis Rennie makes his debut on Accidental Jnr’s Room 2 – a new series for Matthew Herbert’s label dedicated to electronic music outside the main thoroughfare of club tracks.

On Fixed Freedoms, Rennie presents a highly personal work created in response to changing life circumstances as well as the universal upheaval of the pandemic. Across seven diverse pieces the accomplished producer, trombonist and composer pivots between diaristic field recordings and analogue synth experiments.

Rennie’s varied career to date has touched upon many different conceptual approaches, examining the impact of listening with jazz musicians Matthew Bourne and Graham South on 2018’s Muscle Memory and investigating the hidden process of performance preparation with Vonnegut Collective on 2021’s 48 Hours. He’s also a founder member of Barcelona-based AV collective Insectotròpics and co-director of community-oriented arts organisation Walls On Walls.

In the context of the restrictions Rennie experienced along with the rest of society at the height of lockdown, the tracks on Fixed Freedoms took shape as reflections on constraint – whether personal, political or musical. As a predominantly collaborative artist, he was forced to look more critically at his own practice and test the possibilities of collaborating with himself. He captured field recordings which documented his move out of London to the South Coast town of Hastings, and worked in his studio on sequenced and freeform sessions in response to these sounds. Both locations carry their own meaning as sites of migration, gentrification, community and solitude, and so the recordings inspired responses in Rennie’s music which transcended his own immediate situation.

The practice of one-take recordings (from which the music on this EP is taken) both embodies the freedom of improvisation and the fixed boundaries of the end result. Within the confines of limited tools and approaches lie untold possibilities, which manifest in highly individual, ear-snaggingly immediate pieces that surprise and satisfy in equal measure.