SHIPWRECK

Shipwreck was recorded in September 2016 after a horrible summer when I felt like I was coming apart at the seams. The way the piece sounds and the way it came together fits with this feeling (of falling).

The piece starts with tumultuous waves of sound that subside to reveal fragments, pieces of wreckage washed up on the shore, tender and fresh. These moments come from pieces of mine written over the past ten years that never really saw the light of day (partly due to a lack of confidence). Some of these musical moments just kept coming back into my head, prompting me to trawl through my notepads and voice memos from the past decade like a magpie, seeing what else shone out. These ideas were then written out and stuck onto an A2 piece of paper along with a collage of stuff that felt important to me at that time (e.g. a photo of the pianist Alfred Cortot, quotes from Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift). It was a visualisation of all the crap that had accumulated in my mind at that time. This was my score for the early performances of this piece.

Solo improvisation had become a way of staying active as a musician without commitment. Without committing to a composition, to other musicians, to a style/genre, even an instrument (preparing the piano was a way of rejuvenating the sound of the instrument but also a way of playing the piano whilst not playing the piano). It was partly a defensive position: free improvisation had become, amongst other things, a way of avoiding judgement. Shipwreck was like all the musical ideas that I’d suppressed over the past decade forcing themselves into the foreground and forming a piece despite my ego’s defensive dance. Having that score in front of me for the early performances was a declaration that this was a piece (with the sense of vulnerability and taking a stand that this involves). Interestingly, I have since lost the score.

Versions of Shipwreck were played at concerts during 2015-2016, most of them at Free Range, a series of experimental music, film and poetry events that I run in my home town of Canterbury, UK (www.freerangecanterbury.org). Over the course of these performances the order of the fragments within the piece gradually formed to the point where the first 7 minutes were roughly the same each time. The improvisation that followed was always coloured by the feeling of having got a bunch of aesthetic/personal/historical baggage out of my system. It felt like a fresh start each time.

This recording of Shipwreck came from a two-day recording session that included an evening concert. I think there were two large edits in each of the longer pieces so the music that you hear here is part studio recording and part live recording. The evening concert, like this album, consisted of a version of Shipwreck, an interlude and a version of Roscoe’s Ritual.

INTERLUDE

The audience at the concert was very small and chairs were set up in a circle around the piano. Beneath each chair were singing bowls and antique cymbals. For the second piece, the interlude, the audience (most of whom were friends and musicians) were invited to sing and play as I used e-bows and bowed the bass strings of the piano with fishing wire. The aim was to make the space sing [and for the attention to be deflected out, away from me and the piano at the centre of the circle, out to the walls and rafters of this beautiful space] (the concert and recording took place in a deconsecrated Victorian church called the St Gregory’s Centre).

ROSECOE’S RITUAL

Roscoe’s Ritual is named after the saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell and is inspired by his album Sound (one of the first jazz records I heard that seemed to focus on sound rather than vocabulary: what a liberation!) and a workshop exercise that was part of a week-long series called the Creative Music Workshop in the Chicago Jazz Festival in 2010. Roscoe asked each musician to improvise a solo, the rest of the group was instructed to come in after a minute or two and accompany the soloist. After each ‘piece’ Roscoe analysed what had happened in detail, often criticising the soloists for not providing a clear enough cue for the ensemble to come in and pointing out moments where the ensemble had missed an entry and failed to take an opportunity to support the soloist. This sense of aesthetic clarity helped me to connect my previous musical experience (in rock, classical and jazz music) with the world of free improvisation: the same rules applied just to different material.

The piece starts small with an angular but tender melody that grows and grows until the tension splits the music apart. From this point on the music is improvised but with a sense, like Shipwreck, of starting afresh.

ARTWORK & DESIGN

A year after recording Shipwreck I asked the artist Donna Fitzgerald if she would be interested in making an animation for the music. To my surprise, delight and slight embarrassment, she responded by making hundreds of beautiful drawings, prints and acetates. There were plans for a zine to be made around the music that would also be the packaging for a physical release. But Donna’s collaborator moved back to India and Donna began a Masters degree in animation and graphics at UCA. Another year past and I asked the designer Ole Henriksen if he would be interested in using Donna’s artwork to make an animation and the packaging for a vinyl release. Ole managed this brilliantly whilst also completing his degree show at UCA, applying for jobs, getting a job and moving to London.

RECORDING & MIXING

Daniel Taylor recorded the music and gave me an initial mono mix that became the benchmark for subsequent mixing. Many talented people with great ears were generous with their time and helped me with the mixing. It took me a couple of years of trying things out to realise that the audio worked best when it was simple.

NOTE: the end of Roscoe’s Ritual sounds distorted. This is not the levels peaking. At this point the piano contained 5 e-bows, 3 vibrators, a cappuccino whisk, a large spring used to unblock drains and a special device with guitar pickups made by the artist Tim Long that was connected to a small amplifier with a chorus effect. 

Music composed, improvised and performed by Sam Bailey

Recorded by Daniel Taylor

Artwork by Donna Fitzgerald

Design by Ole Henriksen (www.ole.graphics)

Mixed and mastered by Jack Hues with special thanks to Joel Magill, Matt Wright, Daniel Taylor and Joe Bailey.

Thanks to all the people who pre-ordered the album through Kickstarter: this wouldn’t have been possible without you. Also thanks to Canterbury Christ Church University, Oliver Perrott-Webb, Nadia Bailey, Eva Bailey and Rosa Bailey, Tim Long (for the Perspex pick-up device), all the audience members who listened, played and sang on this recording.