“And still, a resonance” is here!
The album is now available for purchase on Bandcamp, and available wherever you stream music.
CDs are in production and shipping dates will be announced when confirmed - in the meantime you can reserve a CD through the below Bandcamp page.
More words on this record below.
words on “And still, a resonance”
When it first became known to me that Audrey would be visiting my city of residence, Tokyo, in January of this year (2025), I scrambled to find a place for us to play and record in. I got in touch with a recording engineer friend of mine, Daiki Iimura - with whom I’d been involved with through my traditional Japanese ensemble group, ON-ON - who I knew would help me out with ideas on where and how to record. His initial suggestion was to find a small recital hall somewhere out in the countryside that would be available to rent, have a nice piano, and a reverby room to record in. We spent a short while exploring those options, but when it became clear that we’d only have a single day - or a matter of hours, really - to record what we hoped would be a full-length album, the process of applying and then traveling out to record in one of those spaces seemed a bit insurmountable.
It was then that we came across Orpheus Recording Studios, on the eastern outskirts of inner Tokyo, which offered a room with a high ceiling and a well-looked-after Yamaha grand piano, and ended up being the best choice for our situation. The person in charge of tuning said piano was a technician by the name of Hideo Tsuji, who had been hard at work since the early morning of our arrival at the studio. When we loaded in on the day of recording, he asked me to try the piano and tell me what I thought - so I sat down at this standard-looking Yamaha grand and started playing, but what came out was a sound closer to maybe a Steinway. It was rich, warm, and beautiful, with none of the heavy stiffness that one comes across in Yamaha grands every now and then. Tsuji san seemed pleased that I liked what I heard, and proceeded to tell me that he hadn’t just tuned it, he had customised some of the mechanics of the hammers so that it had a deeper, warmer sound. It was as if he had known exactly what I needed in a piano, before I’d even met him. He'd also gone to the effort of designing a piano stool especially for a studio environment that doesn’t squeak when you move around on it, and a bespoke sheet music stand that can be used inside the piano, on top of the strings. Tsuji san stayed around for a while to listen to our music, and since this recording we’ve stayed in close contact.
Daiki recorded Audrey and I together in Orpheus’s main recording room, and so what you hear on this album is us playing relatively close together - not in separate rooms, as might happen on a regular recording. As a result the album feels closer to a live recording rather than a fine-tuned studio album - this also comes out in our playing, I believe, and a good portion of the album uses the first takes of the pieces we played. Both Audrey and I hope that people listen to this recording much like they would listen to a live performance - from start to finished, focused, and in a good listening environment.
The pieces we recorded on this day in January all have little stories of their own, which I will give briefs about on a track-by-track basis below.
Owlfactory
I wrote this piece initially for Audrey and I to play at our 2022 Tempo Rubato concert (see my “words on A Modicum of Hope” post from last week). I didn’t have much of a concept in mind when I was writing it, but in retrospect it has a lot of the nuances of contemporary Australian jazz music that Audrey and I spent many formative years being ensonced in, through our small ensembles at the VCA and the live music we would be going to listen to. Learning composition as a university student from pianist Andrea Keller was an important experience for me, and there is a lot of her influence that can be heard throughout this piece. It’s also the longest track on the album, featuring 2 distinct sections that formulate it into a kind of musical suite, finishing with an extended piano feature.
Hold Me (Responsible)
Soul and R&B music have always had a strong presence in both of our lives - as many current fans of Audrey Powne are well aware of - despite being a vastly different type of musical expression to the type of contemporary jazz we studied at university. This piece came from that soulful place in a way - I wanted to write something that was very simple but very earthy, softly groovy, and used mostly triad-based chord voicings. Being earnest, grounded, and humble, and loving other people as such, were ideas that I had in my mind as I was writing it. I brought this piece along to the recording not knowing if we’d end up keeping it or not, but the way it came together on the day had a magic to it that made me very glad it eventuated. It’s now probably my favorite track on the album.
Interlude: Breaths Before
Before we finished the recording session, I got Audrey to record a series of extended techniques on the trumpet - breaths, trills, growls, and other experiments in embouchure - that I planned to sample and reuse as a synth sound. This track features those sounds, implemented through sample-based synthesis that I designed and crafted myself. The breathy tones that Audrey recorded transformed wonderfully into soft, humming synth pads, and against that I attached several different piano samples mostly taken from “A Modicum of Hope”, chopped them up, reversed them, and send them through granular effects. The result is an electronic sound collage that contrasts with the primarily acoustic nature of the rest of the album, but functions perfectly as a palette cleanser halfway through the record, a space to breathe for a while in preparation for the final pieces - the titular ‘breaths before’. A lot of the trumpet synth sounds featured in this track also make an appearance in the background of other pieces - afterthoughts made from fragments of our recording session.
A Myriad of Dread
This piece starts with some of the most dissonant sounds on the record, with tense cluster chords in the piano and frenetic runs in the trumpet that lead into adventurous free improvisation over a spiraling piano ostinato. This improvised section culminates in a dark vortex of clouded sound, originating in the deep bass register of the piano but evolving through electronically processed trumpet tones. These disorienting sonic clouds clear into a beautiful ending with some richly voiced chords, however, and the piece is punctuated at the very end by one of the most incredible sounds I’ve ever heard Audrey get on the trumpet.
A Modicum of Hope
This track is the light that follows A Myriad of Dread, described in detail in my previous post, “words on A Modicum of Hope”.
Like Dust
When we were both still living in Melbourne, Audrey formed a small ensemble she named Andromeda, which featured myself on piano, Marty Holoubek on bass, and James McLean on drums. The band mostly showcased her original pieces, but I contributed Like Dust, a piece I wrote on a whim for the band. At the time I had been enamored by the sound of a tonic major chord with a 4th or 11th in the voicing somewhere below of the 3rd of the chord - a suspended-yet-not sound that I really liked - and it features heavily in this tune. I also really liked the idea of a ‘samba ballad’ - music that uses the infectious groove of a samba but at a very melancholic tempo. When performed by Andromeda, the piece features those nice slow samba grooves through Jimmy’s drumming, but it’s since taken a life of its own away from the drums - it’s also been performed in one of my ensembles here in Tokyo, Francis Bowmore, and also by Audrey and myself as a duo. To date it’s one of the few pieces from my original repertoire that has had longevity that stretches over more than ten years - although it’s a fairly simple song, over that time it’s grown and adapted itself into the different spaces it’s been performed in. The recording we made of it for this record is the perfect representation of how Audrey and I have associated ourselves with one another over the years, and sounds like how it feels to us: just like returning home to the arms of an old friend.
We sincerely hope this album is an affecting, enriching experience for its listeners - it was an emotional journey several years in the making. Thank you for reading & hope you enjoy!