This album is a compilation of four different experiments with music and video which I brought together for the sake of musical housekeeping. The instrumental tracks are often rough ideas rather than fully formed compositions, but they have some merits that I think make them worth sharing.
Night Symphony and Light Symphony accompany two short films I made during the Covid-19 coronavirus lockdown. I wanted to experiment with different types of composition and not be restricted by lyrics. I wanted to work loosely with the traditional four movement structure, hence the ‘symphony’ title. The whole process was obviously a homemade affair due to the lockdown and written using tunes and ditties that were left over from earlier recordings that had not been used.
The Crushing Snails ditties accompanied an experimental film project that I made in 2013 to experience lots of different areas of film production that I had never encountered before, from improvising with actors without a script all the way through to writing music for the images. In the spirit of experimentation (combined with the fact that I hadn’t played music for four years) I decided to retune the guitar to a different tuning than usual. This meant that nothing I had learnt before made any sense to me, and the instrument was new again. I recorded in my parents home in my childhood bedroom. I wanted to record quickly instead of getting caught up in the technicality of it all. The effect is a literally ‘homemade’ feel to the tracks.
The Isra music accompanies an eponymous film by Will Whiting. I was inspired by the themes within the movie to create music based around the number three (e.g., three piano parts, three chords, 3/4 time etc.) I also wanted to experiment with Shepard tone and move towards more midi work, having recently focused on analogue recordings.
Credits
released August 31, 2021
All music was performed and recorded by James Fair between 2013 and 2021.