New single: Delta + Music Video
Music video for new single Delta
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 single: Unnamed Unseen + Music Video
Music video for new single Unnamed Unseen
Unnamed Unseen is the first single from my solo album Memory Islands. Written for Hardanger fiddle and electronics, it is inspired by a line from Robert Macfarlane's book Landmarks about nature words falling out of our language. “Once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit.”
The music video was made by Marry Waterson, woven with hand painted film and drawing on themes of nature and fading/lost memories.
Download & Stream single: https://ffm.to/unnamed-unseen
CD/DL/Stream album: https://bfan.link/memory-islands
New Release on Accidental Records
A short piece for violin and electronics is released on Accidental Records.
A new work of mine for violin and electronics is released today on Accidental Records. The compilation called Antechamber Music features music by a fantastic selection of experimental artists and is available on limited edition cassette (with glittery tape!), download, and streaming.
The piece is an shortened version of an unreleased track Will I Dream? which gets its title from a quote from Peter Hyam’s sequel to the Kubrick classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The moment the onboard computer HAL confronts his digital ‘mortality’ – all memories erased. It has an unsettling sound world with lots of space between the notes to create a sense of void. Most of the sounds you hear have originated from the violin, manipulated through FX pedals (including the TC Helicon VoiceLive) and computer processed effects.
Artist-In-Residence Epping Forest
I’ve been invited by City of London Epping Forest to be its Artist in Residence in 2019.
If you follow me on Instagram you may have recently noticed an influx of photos of trees, mushrooms and ponds. I am excited to announce that I’ve been invited by City of London Epping Forest to be Artist in Residence in 2019 - a whole year let loose in the forest to explore nature, local history and sound.
Having lived near the forest all my life, I'm in my element researching how people have shaped Epping Forest throughout the centuries: you can find Iron Age camps, medieval roads, a Tudor hunting lodge, an C18th grotto, pollarded trees, ponds created by WWII bombs, and maybe even Dick Turpin’s hideout!
Although most of my reading is online, it’s lovely to have some books to dip into. Some of the older ones I own belonged to my Great Grandfather, who lived on Smarts Lane in Loughton. I’ll shed some light on my family connections to the history of the forest in another blog.
Over the coming months I will be writing music inspired by the stories and the places I visit in the forest. If you want to follow my progress, please sign up to my newsletter and follow me on Instagram I Facebook I Twitter.
Forest Focus Magazine announces my residency on pages 5 and 13.
My project will be linked to Waltham Forest’s year as London Borough of Culture 2019, a Mayor of London initiative, and will integrate with an exciting new project called ‘The People’s Forest’ which is being curated by Luke Turner and Kirsteen McNish.
Want to visit Epping Forest? The London Overground connects London Liverpool Street to Epping Forest at Chingford and the Central Line offers access points to the forest from Leytonstone through to Epping.