More frozen improvisations, resulting in two contrasting sets of pieces, each set based on a very limited set of ideas, moving in different ways toward very different ends. The 'Life' series is serious; intense, deep-seated joy. The 'Orinoco' series is more like pulling the legs off spiders; just vicious. Not that they sound like it, of course.

I've been a huge fan of science-/fantasy/magical fiction ever since my early teens, and I find particular pleasure in the sort of writing which begins, tautly, in our everyday reality, but infests and infects that reality with a quirk, with a slight alteration of one parameter, so that the fiction's world is entirely familiar, but also subtly wrong, and yet that wrongness nonetheless fits somehow. On this album, I have tried to recover that sense, translated into musical worlds. From a large variety of influences (from Schumann to Shostakovich and Messiaen, Chick Corea to Little Richard & Rick Wakeman, and many others) I have tried to create a musical world which is stable, fully wound, and which creates familiarities, but into which the comfortably unexpected occasionally pokes its bloodied nose, and perhaps all of a sudden you're somewhere else entirely?

I'm also trying to work against conventional ways of composing, with their planning, structures and rules, and clear beginnings and endings. I’m interested in avoiding, despite appearances, the presence of a discreet ‘art object’. These tracks are very much based around frozen (and laboured) improvisation - no structural plan, no over-arching processes, but of course references to these and more - it’s very physical, for me. I simply have some ideas of materials I like & propose to use, and I get to work. Analogies to wood-carving abstract shapes (from experience) or freeform potting (from observation) are probably apt. More than this, musical ideas re-appear all over the place and on different tracks - none of the pieces are (intentionally) completely self-sufficient - something which is incidental in one piece becomes a focus of attention in another, something which goes in one direction in one place goes in another elsewhere. It’s all part of one ongoing activity, something we call 'life'.

Sheet music for all titles available at www.sheetmusicplus.com