Alan Dunn recently asked me to contribute some music to The Lighthouse Invites the Storm, a festival of celebration for Malcolm Lowry, running around Liverpool from the 17th to 29th of July. Below is the fruit of my labour, along with a description of the rationale for the piece, which is also available for free download from my bandcamp (which includes a PDF of the liner notes).
Alan had chanced to hear a track from Hesperian Garden while simultaneously auditioning Balam Ronan’s field recordings from the Mexican Día de los Muertos celebrations. He asked if I’d be interested in contributing something hallucinogenic and mescal-fuelled, so here is my response: an electroacoustic re-imagining of Balam’s documents; a trembling, drunken dream with flashes of heaven and hell – the celestial and chthonic – punctuated by the sound of carnivalesque street bands drifting in through an open window…
Not desiring to literally interpret Lowry’s multi-faceted, ‘churrigueresque’ work, I focused on a number of images that I found potent, both from Lowry’s text, and from the biographical detail and academic interpretation surrounding it.
