Available to listen to and buy at Bandcamp
Release date: 09 March 2025
Format: digital download. Artwork and typography by Landschaft.
The Coalmasters: A partner work to The Ironmasters. The Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire border is a transformed landscape. Of pit villages, spoil heaps, tramways, canal and railway lines and in the later days of the coal extraction history, huge opencast workings. The Coalmasters orchestrated that landscape with the sweat and toil of the working man [and in it's early history, of women and children]. An iniquitous relationship that took a swerve at Nationalisation in 1947 and the Miners Strike of the 1984/5. Then the end, a death by a thousand cuts of an industry spanning the centuries. The pit heads fell, the shafts were filled, the coal working sites were flattened and light industry and warehousing took their place. Latterly, with 900 million tons of recoverable reserves remaining underground, coal is burnt no more along the Trent Valley chain of power stations, and inversely, coal transforms the landscape once more - into solar farms, wind turbines and gas fired power stations.
This album is my response to the Coal industry and those who made it. It is still very much a part of my life. Family members are ex-miners, I see the transformed landscape around me. Silver Birch, a species that reclaimed the land after the last ice age reclaims the abandoned rail beds, spoil heaps are now grazed by livestock.
A new cleaner future lies ahead, but one day the pits will be re-opened, of that I am sure. To mine coal as a raw material, not a fuel.
This work is my response to the social, economic and topographical impacts of the Coalmasters. These works were made using Moog semi modular synthesiers: two Mother 32 and one Subharmonicon. There is a sampled choral underlayer to the works but the main instrumentation brings the sonic depth of analogue to this music, and encourages me to make more.