New single: Delta + Music Video

Delta is the second single from my solo album Memory Islands, released on Bigo and Twigetti 29 September.

Ellie says “Delta was created entirely on my violin with pizzicato chopped up and spread across drum sample pads, allowing me to play patterns that wouldn’t have fallen naturally under my fingers. It was inspired by my father’s recovery from a coma after a cardiac arrest (he thankfully made a full recovery). As his brain fired up, memories were replayed as if happening for the first time, then filed away in the right places. In Delta, I was thinking about the electrical pulses that transmit this information around the brain. Memories returned slowly at first but then the floodgates opened. It reminded me of a TV documentary I’d seen where a dried-up riverbed filled with water after a monsoon; the water found its way through all the previously carved chasms and cracks in the bed (not dissimilar to the grooves on the surface of a brain) and then into a large river.”

The music video was made by my brother Mark Wilson. He explains the techy stuff much better than me …

“The animation in this music video is the output of custom developed Python code. The application samples audio chunks of Delta in real-time and evolves and adapts the evolution and appearance of lines, intersecting triangular formations and background gradients in response to pre-defined grouped frequency band intensity thresholds. Due to an element of randomness in vector calculation, the line animation will evolve differently each time the application is executed, so this video represents one of many possible interpretations of the audio stream.”

Download/stream single: https://bfan.link/ew-delta
Album CD/DL/Stream: https://bfan.link/memory-islands

New Album: Memory Islands (released on Bigo & Twigetti)

My new album Memory Islands is available for preorder today (1 September) on the Bigo and Twigetti label. Available on CD and via all download and streaming platforms.

The music on the album - written for violin, hardanger fiddle and electronics - explores the strange landscape of memory and the spirit of place. The sound world a mixture of experimental soundscapes, drones, and contemporary classical but punctuated with melodic/folky lines on the violin.

It includes a recording of my grandfather reminiscing about his experiences and lost years as a Navy seaman in World War II (By the Time I Got Back Pt 1); along with pieces inspired by the how the brain reboots after waking from a coma (Delta), a line from Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks about nature words falling out of our language (Unnamed Unseen) and a quote from the 1984 film 2010: The Year We Make Contact in the moment the onboard computer HAL 900 confronts his digital ‘mortality’– all memories erased (Will I Dream?).

Most of the sounds heard on this album are created from the violin (sampling, processed through effects, detuned, extended techniques).

Singles:
September 1st - Unnamed Unseen
September 15th - Delta
September 29th - By The Time I Got Back, Pt. 2 (Focus Track)

Cover artwork by Janaina Mello Landini