Landschaft music is available to listen to and buy at Bandcamp
The Coalmasters: published 09 March 2025 on Bandcamp.
Landschaft is a soundscape rather than a confinement within the term 'music'. A positioning of my artistic output within the array of sub-genres that comprise 'Ambient' music. Landschaft is this website and my evolving interpretation of what interests me. It is I suppose, a poem to time passed by.
Landschaft is about exploring moods evoked by remembrance and experience. Old maps and photographs; rediscovered histories. Distilling and translating mood feelings, that synergy a summation to nostalgia. The ode to joy or the prayer to the souls of the departed. Sound, of all media of expression is perhaps best placed to achieve this. Sound like history is temporal, a movement of one state to another; it is non-representational in the purest sense, but is loaded with association and so carries with it meaning and feeling.
31 May 2003: Indistinct Borders, the first Landschaft tone sculpture released. A collection of Satie-esque piano reflections interspersed with low key electronic works. The mood is dark green.
I drew inspiration for this work (and the whole Landschaft project) from Chronicals of Lake Narocz by Mieczyslaw Lisiewicz. I found a rare copy of this long out of print work in the sencond-hand book market on London's South Bank in the early 1990s.
From recollections of the lost and waning cultures of central and northern Europe and by my collection of pre-WWII contemporary photographic travelogues, I was taken to create these mood pieces, and sometime along the way the verse piece below.
Indistinct Borders. Histories are forgotten and maps are burned...and in the Borders, no one remembers, and within a generation, all that remains is dust.
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31 December 2006: Shot with splashes of sunlight glimpsed through trees.
20 December 2020: Re-mixed and re-released with additional long format piece 'Aurora'.
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31 January 2008: Most of the pieces are minimal piano meditations with subtle ambience counterpointing the main themes. This album is something of a personal journey. The cover photograph was taken by my father in 1947 in Singapore. The mood is orange fire and gold leaf.
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This was my first commercial release through netlabel Atmoworks (now defunct?).
09 March 2007: Inspired by the Edgar Allan Poe short story, "Landsor's Cottage", this is a piece in the signature dark-pastoral Landschaft compositional style. If anyone is looking for a visual reference, 'Early Morning', a work from 1825 by Samuel Palmer, contemporaneous with and entirely in synchrony with the mood Poe creates in "Landsor".
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29 January 2022. Re-mastered and re-interpreted. 3x 50 minutes of deep drone.
21 June 2007: a canonical/fugal piece of rotating cycles in the dronology sub-genre. Dark, mesmeric, uplifting.
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19 August 2007: "Jute". I was playing around with some out-takes from my "Nostalgia" sessions, overlaying the same piece of music and staggering the start of the layers emulating a canon or round and it took on a form of its own, the whole greater than the sum of the parts. 48 hours from inception to completion, a wonderful happy accident. It sits in the same sonic space as Eno's Apollo and the Cliff Martinez Solaris soundtrack. I made a limited edition of the original album in a hand-made cover, in jute cloth.
Listening again in 2020, 13 years later, I found I could add to this work, one of my favourites. I have added 4 new pieces and some subtle laying to the original Jute suite, publishing the complete work on Bandcamp on 07 January 2021.
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17 October 2007: 'and now the trembling light': Cascades and glissandos, slowed-down church organs, a shimmering harmonic tension holds the listener in it's thrall; an epic in two parts in a vast reverbarent space. Inspired by a wonderful pastoral verse by Samual Palmer, 'Shoreham: Twilight Time'. Re-mixed and including an extra track from the original session. Published on Bandcamp 16 July 2021.
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16 November 2007: "Silence" A double album in two parts. Dark-ambient drone.
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16 November 2007: "The True Path", my most challenging work to date. Two vast slabs of sound each around an hour long... Re-recorded 2025 and issued on Bandcamp 01 March 2025
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Various dates: a promotional EP that I use as a calling card. Not for sale.
18 November 2008. Beginning of the New Winter - the second work in the Dark Seasons triptych. A return to my more composed style, flowing out of a series of quickly rendered improvisations. Sketches for the month of October. Pastoral in theme, canonical in style, an album I enjoyed making. First work in the Dark Seasons tryptych. Remastered and published on Bandcamp 17 July 2021.
Original release 29 March 2009, re-mastered 13 July 2021. Walpurgisnacht - the second work in the Dark Seasons triptych. Walpurgisnacht being the close of the old winter; the witches night, St Walpurga's night. A festival of such potency that Christians, pagans and Satanists lay claim to it across the breadth of Northern Europe. It is the festival marking the transition from winter to spring; 30 April/1 May.
11 November 2009. Third work in the Dark Seasons triptych.
28 November 2021. Re-mastered and to end January 2021 offered for GBP 1-00 via Bandcamp.
25 January 2010. Beginning of the New Winter, Walpurgisnacht and Zamek, "The Dark Seasons Triptych". A remake, remodel of the three works.
01 May 2010. My second concerto work, one epic piece of high drama.
07 January 2021. Undergoing substantial re-work.
05 August 2020. A re-imaging of my foundation work, written in 1984.
12 December 2020. The first in my new series of works inspired by English history and landscape. Cloud Hill, Sandiacre, on the Nottinghamshire Derbyshire border, a market town surviving the vicissitudes of history and wedged in the crook of canal, railway, motorway and soon HS2.
28 June 2021. The second in my English series. Seven shorter works exploring the relationship between landscape and artist.
05 July 2021. Deep drone. Evolving tone colours. Exploration of the concept of klangfarbenmelodie in four long format works.
14 July 2021. A Keith Jarrett 'Spheres' like work in two parts. church organ drone, live improvisation with post production overlayers.
21 July 2021. An archive work from 2007 rediscovered in my archive. Six long format minimal, reflective works.
01 October 2021. My interpretation of Celtic land patterns. Mediolanum 'middle of the plain'. Whitchurch, the English Mediolanum stands on the meridian that runs the length of Britain. These pieces reflect the lines of radiance from that Delphic centre defined by solstice and Pythagorean geometric systems.
18 October 2021. A return to long format work. Two 50 minute interpretations of the harmonious relationships between two rotating patterns, like Mediolanum taking as a starting point the scalic principles of 'Moments of Symmetry' and running these through various algorithmic managed generative processes. The resulting pieces formed of the same process. Canorum: resonant, ringing, sonorous.
29 November 2021. Five live genre busting sessions, four with no overdubs. Mastering eq / compression / limiting only. Hammer beats from the North. TS Eliot's 'Little Gidding' and a lyrical poem by Alcuin were my inspiration here exploring themes of circularity and layering. So, the work has a very much historical foundation; book-ended by the start and end pieces 'When the Short Day is Brightest' and 'Green Branches Give their Shadow to Tired Men'... but anchored to the present by the transformed landscape of the monolithic BALTIC, Gateshead.
18 December 2021. Christesmaesse - Christes Maesse - Festival of Christ in Old English is an inherited festival, re-purposed by the ever-pragmatic Romans from pagan predecessor faiths. This series of six short and medium format pieces explores that evolution, celebrating in improvisational live-take form the magic of mid-winter.
01 March 2022. Split the flint, landschaft 26 comprises five rhythm-percussive pieces. The rhythmic structure employs 'perfect balance' and 'well-formedness' comprising jazz and non-western hierarchies of the kind employed in King Crimson's more adventurous work. In that respect this album could be said to be math-rock. The rhythms drive sub-rhythms generated by Karma (Kay Algorithmic Realtime Music Architecture) nested within the 'parent' rhythm. Each piece was a real time take with few or no overdub. For the first time there is real guitar on a landschaft album. This work is loud so watch your levels.
06 April 2022. This is perhaps my most highly 'composed' work to date and tested my skills to the limit. It comprises a suite of three works; the first and second, the title work, a two part piece of 37:00 and 11:29 minutes; two shorter format works follow. I have constructed this aural metaphor to represent that proverb: of the point of reference from which hope exits - it's polar opposite despair and the wished for journey to the green grass on the other side of the hill. That seems an appropriate response to present turbulent world events.
07 April 2022. This Landschaft album is one that I have crafted in my English landscape series. It is simple statement, an examination of the New Town; a reappraisal of the optimism of greenfield living through the lens of time.
16 May 2022. This Landschaft album is a suite comprising three pieces evoking the mood of Yeats' 'In the Seven Woods' collection of poetry. There are very deep sub-bass tones underpinning very understated meandering tonal variation.
29 June 2022. is my response to a particular set of circumstances, leading me to Sheila's corpus of art works; an embodiment of landscape viewed through the lens of Sheila's eye and art practice. The circumstances are the back story and are mine: the discovery of this artist through a slim exhibition catalogue 'Sheila Fell, The South Bank Centre 1990, no ISBN' found in a second-hand bookshop in Southwell, Nottinghamshire...
20 July 2022. A second entry to my 'split the flint' series, landschaft 031. Again, 'perfect balance' and 'well-formedness' and real time takes went into creation of these works.
07 October 2022. a jigsaw puzzle of influences and references; among them: Killing Joke (layered grind-riffing), Hendrix (in full improv mode)' Section 25 (meanderging, mesmeric), Joy Division (whip-crack snare and punchy kicks), Sleep (Dopesmoker - loud and long), Zappa (complex polyrhythms), Durutti Column (the start and end pieces). For the first time Landschaft is in classc band format:guitar, bass, drums, synth. All of that cooked up into a genre hybrid I could describe as math-rock, ambient doom metal, djent....
11 January 2023. This release, Landschaft 033a, Shotfiring in Coalmines marks a return to my ambient style, deep and dark. It is informed by the geography, geology and history beneath my feet as I type now. I am, as the crow flies within a few hundred metres of eight former coal mine pitheads. This work reflects my recollection of those times: lying in bed as a child hearing or rather feeling the occasional crump of shotfiring beneath me in the seams and tunnels below.
24 February 2023. This release, Landschaft 034a, 53.008177, -0.955982 is deepest ambience, anchored to it's title geo-coordinates. I created some night photography, the cover artwork, one of a series I made in December 2022 under moonlight and this is a 30 sec exposure on a still cool night. There is a tranqulity about the image that imspired me to create this work. Each of the bell triggers represent the eddying currents and the moving mist. There is a conventional stereo and a Dolby Atmos 10 channel spatial mix, The former is published on Bandcamp; the latter an ongoing project that I hope to make into a moving image work.
23 December 2023. A drone in my sogetsu series. An overlay of gently lifting scales of effected trumpet; it emerged from the creative ooze in one take. An aleatoric happening. To transport the listener to a peaceful state.
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11 February 2024. This is the first spoken word Landschaft offering. That offering pivoting as a weighty counterbalance against the sound texture following. A landscape-mood piece that had it's start among the empty sea-scapes of LS Lowry.
30 June 2024. This release, Aubade is my recent foray into more formally composed work. It explores themes of dawn, history and renewal, drawing on the Aubade form adopted by poets from the metaphisical to the present.
29 August 2024. 'Basfordiana is a reflection on the willow growing and basket making industry that took place among the communities along the Leen valley in Basford, a suburb of Nottingham within a mile of where I live. It is no more, and only the echo of it's presence remains.
23 November 2024. Desire paths : the chosen route. Here are my four chosen routes. A quartet of modular self generation pure synthesis. This is my first foray into modular and comprise assemby wholly within VCV Rack where I built a number of clock sysnchronised clusters of modules each set to different intervals that produce non-repeating patterns and layers. Each album is a development of the preceeding in the quartet.
16 January 2025. This collection of shorter and longer format pieces is my reflection on the iron works along the Erewash and Derwent valleys in East Derbyshire/West Nottinghamshire, an industry with family associations. It was tough work and these angular pieces reflect the sweat and toil of those industries that I witnessed and experienced as a child. My visits with my grandfather to the foundry where he worked. The clang and clatter of the ingredients being added to the blast. The hot air choking with dust and muck.
03 February 2025. This is another in my series of landscape-referential works. A tone-poem examination of the grey-blue galleries, inclines and spoil heaps of Dinorwic Quary, North Wales..
22 February 2025. My reflection on the Derbyshire market town of Ilkeston, set high on a hill overlooking the Erewash valley and the landscape of DH Lawrence. I examine the post-industrial geography and find moments of pathos and light in the monuments of past glories.
09 March 2025. A Self-Generative work constructed of software triggers of hardware semi-modular instruments Moog Mother 32 and Subharmonicon.