Preston Field Audio – Rhythm Tree Fell

Out on the 28th March, we’re excited to announce our latest release: an album of experimental pieces from Concrète favourite Carl Brown of Otherchannels (he also did this amazing guest mix for us a few months ago).

This is our most ambitious release yet: two sides of lush treated field recordings, ambient washes and brass band glory, in a hand stamped box with load of extras: a limited edition block-printed postcard, a fold out insert with a poem and original sheet music, a hand printed sticker  in one of four variant colours and a sheaf of extensive field notes.

Inspired by the likes of Aspen Arts Magazine, and more recently labels like Folklore Tapes, it’s been a pleasure putting this one together – we’re sure you’ll love it just as much as we do. For a bit more detail on the music inside, we’ve reproduced the field notes below:

Rhythm Tree Fell is about being young in Preston, it’s about realising you’ve gotten a little older too and you’re still here and realising finally that this isn’t such a bad thing. Through close collaboration with some of the city’s most creative minds, I have tried to capture the mood of Preston sonically.

If you’ve ever stood out on Old Tram Bridge at 5 or 6 am as you’re walking back from a night out and the sun is rising over the river, you’ll hear some of that. If you’ve ever been caught in a torrential downpour and had to take shelter under the market on a car boot day, you’ll hear echoes of that too.

There’s also quite a prominent display of nostalgia for every Preston kid’s favourite Saturday jaunt, a walk up Beacon Fell in Goosnargh, Lancs. This is where the whole project was conceived two years ago and where the name comes from. Preston has such huge potential to be the most beautiful city, and this not just my opinion, it’s the opinion of many residents: friends and strangers alike. I wanted to capture some of that potential, not just with the artists involved in the work of which their potential is undeniable, but I wanted to ingrain it into the sound somehow, I’ll leave it to the listener to decide if that’s apparent.

The works on Rhythm Tree Fell are all variations on a single musical theme. I’d been experimenting with playing guitar over some field recordings I’d made at Beacon Fell in October 2014 and I decided to invite some friends to share their opinions and propose any ideas towards the work, this became the track Rhythm Tree Fell. I knew that track was a piece of a bigger project but it was very different from any of the other material I was working on at the time.

I took it to Josh Clifton who disassembled it and reinterpreted it in his own unique way onto piano. I then knew that I wanted to hear a brass band version too, and invited the Leyland Band Ensemble to perform the piece – we met up and recorded it in Mitchell and Kenyan Cinema a month later. The recording that made the tape isn’t the clearest recording we had, but it was the best performance for sure: it was an honour to work with such a professional and efficient unit as the Leyland Band Ensemble.

Profile of a Forest sits on the A side because it’s a further reinterpretation of Rhythm Tree Fell. In this case, collaborating with good friend and mentor Jon Aveyard. Using strictly found materials and field recordings sourced from Beacon Fell we intended to ‘profile’ the forest sonically as if moving upwards from the core of the earth to the tops of the trees on the fell. Overt concepts aren’t usually a part of my work but I wanted to bring a piece of the landscape that inspired the project onto the record and I’m glad I did, I think it fits in there somehow.

The B side is a collection of field recordings that I worked on alongside the other material. Each of the tracks on the B side was recorded and produced on a single day. The recordings taken that day were elaborated upon with white noise, synthesisers and samples to create short sonic stories of our lovely old city.

Thanks for listening.

Carl Brown, March 2016

The album is available for pre-order now at our Bandcamp, and is strictly limited to 30 copies. We’re having a launch event at the Moorbrook on Easter Monday 28th March where we’ll have copies of the album for sale (and our other releases). Plus Free Stickers.