Landscape and music

version

Well-known member
Having said that, there's an AFX tune off the first Analord 12" which is now inseparable from the Yorkshire moors as the sun goes down after having it on in the car after a particularly chaotic camping trip; one person asleep in the back, the driver completely silent (presumably due to being so angry about how poorly the trip turned out) and me in the passenger seat looking out of the window at the steadily darkening moorland.

 

version

Well-known member
There's something about that opening synth that just sounds like quietly crossing the moors, the synths unfurling like tendrils from the sky, heather, shadows falling across the hills and fields.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm not just talking about listening to music in a field or an underpass, though - I'm wondering if the landscape you live in has an effect on what you listen to, and on what musicians make. Nah mean?
 

version

Well-known member
I think you can tell that RDJ grew up in a rural area, a lot of the early Aphex stuff just sounds like the outside. It's so wide open, there's so much space.

 

version

Well-known member
The internet seems to have scrambled it a bit though, the music of the city reaches into the country. You can live in some leafy suburb or village somewhere and still listen to drill or whatever all day as long as you have an internet connection and I think that what with people spending so much time online and in front of screens, the natural landscape has less influence than the digital.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
And some music (PC music say) doesn't sound like it exists anywhere outside of the internet and computers.

The landscape of the internet is bright, boxy, clean lines.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
What landscape does this bring to mind?


Because the sounds are all filtered and bathed in reverb there's a sense of poor visibility in an open space.

The harmonics plays into the sense of landscape because it doesn't sound happy, nor exactly sad, it sounds a bit sinister, as if poised between one and the other. So it's like dusk, or early morning.
 

droid

Well-known member
Because the sounds are all filtered and bathed in reverb there's a sense of poor visibility in an open space.

The harmonics plays into the sense of landscape because it doesn't sound happy, nor exactly sad, it sounds a bit sinister, as if poised between one and the other. So it's like dusk, or early morning.

Contoured heaths rolling off into blackness? Mournful with an undercurrent of... something?
 
Last edited:

DannyL

Wild Horses
Any Richard Skelton fans here? His musical practice seems to be profoundly about place, particularly the West Pennine Moors IIRC. I don't know his catalogue deeply but love what I've heard.

 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I'm a fan, albeit not a very knowledgeable one. Yeah, the feel of the music seems peculiarly suited to (English) landscape, and so many trackname references to it too:

 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm a fan, albeit not a very knowledgeable one. Yeah, the feel of the music seems peculiarly suited to (English) landscape, and so many trackname references to it too:


Why is that?

Those swaying, see-sawing strings, they remind me of the creaking of ships. Perhaps seabirds, squawking disconsolately.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Why is that?

Listening to a different track now, but the slow but definite evolution of all his music must be a huge factor, along with the (instrumental) throb of feeling life all around you? Instrumentation suggests connecting with something ancient and eternal. That kind of thing. Like Gas in a way, at least in terms of the undulation and throb of the music, which obviously was conceived in a forest (a mathematical, funkless forest consisting of birds fashioned purely from triangles).
 
Last edited:

woops

is not like other people
There used to be a Bristol band called Movietone who made some records that evoked the Severn Estuary very exactly.

good call, they were part of the Flying Saucer Attack axis, I was planning to put em in my 100 but i can't now!
 
Top