With Sturmazdale complete, I find myself in an interesting position which I haven’t been in for some years: I don’t have a follow-up planned. Near the end of the Purlieu sessions, I had decided I wanted to record something that continued from the album, leading to Vacuum Road Songs. VRS was to lead on to the long-scrapped Dead Hymns; Safernoc gave me chance to record Since Every Hour, an album I’d wanted to do for years, and that direction pushed me to record a full on experimental classical album, Sturmazdale, via the ‘return to samples’ approach Leaf Pass. Now, however, I don’t have an album I ‘want’ to record. There’s no real musical or conceptual theme that I feel like I need to record next.
This doesn’t mean I’m out of ideas, but realising that I no longer feel tied to a series of linked albums is such a liberating feeling. I’ve actually got several ideas I want to work on. A couple are based entirely around field recordings, which is something I’ve wanted to do for ages, one is a re-recording of an old tape from 1997 named Cliff Edge, and I’m expanding upon the atonal sounds I played with on Sturmazdale by getting to grips with serial composition techniques. There’s also a bigger project I’m planning for a long way into the future. The main point is, it doesn’t matter which order these come out in. Album-wise, everything from Purlieu to Sturmazdale was sort of set in stone, whereas now, I can work on what I want, when I want, and release it when it’s finished (the release schedules that have plagued me so much over the last eighteen months are no more!). This is a wonderful feeling, and I think I’ll be able to record at a sensible speed from now on.
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