It’s a great pleasure for me to finally see these two releases issued on vinyl. Both records explore different themes that captured my imagination during the time of making them.
‘Vignetting The Compost’ partly draws on a theme of the endless cycle of life and death, of growth and decay and how the two are dependent on each other, often felt strongly by humans as polar opposites but the process of which are seamlessly connected. I was partly inspired by Walt Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’, which I was reading around the time of writing this album. The images gained from books are created in the reader’s mind, but so can be said of listening to music, so the creation of the imagery is somewhat of a collaboration between the writer and the reader or listener. This album also explores the processes of pain, loss, suffering and healing, with an optimistic hopeful tone growing over the lamentation like ivy on a gravestone. I’ve always been fascinated with the quality of the imagination and dreams, how edges are unfinished and indefinite, unlike the boundaries of a cinema screen. In dreams, forms and details can seem vivid yet vague, impressionistic, powerful yet difficult to recall. These were the qualities and aesthetics that I focussed on with this album, including intertwining musical ‘vignettes’ amongst the more structured tracks.
'Ovals & Emeralds' explores particular themes that I found haunting as a child: outdated ornate Victorian design, dolls and clowns, automatons, wind up toys, fairgrounds and circuses. The goal was to evoke these themes through manipulation of my own instrumentation, rather than directly sampling fairground organs etc. Although there are some more playful moments on the EP, the dreamlike qualities often take the form of feverish nightmares, dizzying and disorientating with a dose of paranoia.
