“In some respects much recalling the early Ochre era work of Stylus, Land weaves a hollowed melodic mirage of faintly treading, bittersweetly-coiled melancholic tablatures that bask the listener in a yearning glaze of twilight mirages. Touching stuff.” LOSING TODAY MAGAZINE

“A truly lovely selection of atmospheres and ambiences”. ULRICH SCHNAUSS

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On Monday 5th April, Daniel Land will release “Pentimento”, the debut album from his new side project riverrun. A limited edition CD is available to buy now.

Taking its name from the famous opening line of James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake, the riverrun project (always in lowercase letters) is a series of ‘secret’ ambient recordings that Land has been working for over a decade in parallel to his songs.

Throughout the last fifteen years, Land amassed a library of several hundred textures and soundcolours which, as he puts it, “Were just little ideas created when my attention was focused on something else – normally while I was recording a more traditional song”. In the process of engineering and recording a track he would become sidetracked by a new sound and would, in his words, “Spend a while exploring the ramifications of it”.

The project came together over the last year after Land stumbled upon the idea of using some of the sketches as film music. As he went through his tapes, Land began to blend some of these sketches and fragments together, painstakingly matching key signatures and looking for interesting contrasts and juxtapositions. Elements recorded on a four track cassette machine in 1995 ended up sitting next to new guitar sounds from the cutting room floor of the Modern Painters record. Old tracks that Land had thought were finished ended up being incorporated into newer tracks, which in turn would become blended into a still newer piece – each step of the process adding another layer of detail to the aural patchwork.

The end result of this compositional process is a beautiful aural canvas of almost unimaginable complexity, whose deeper level of subliminal detail (sometimes literally hundreds of layers of sound are running concurrently) belies the surface simplicity of the music.

Though very different from the dream-pop work of The Modern Painters (even Land sees the riverrun tracks as being “diametrically opposed” to it) the riverrun record was finished at the same time as the Painters longplayer and can be seen as a curious contrast to it – the other side of the musical coin, as it were. As Daniel says, “Sometimes when you’re making records, you get sick of hearing the same songs over and over. The riverrun record was always the one I’d go back to at 5am when I’d finished recording and it was dark outside and I needed something at a different pace to relax into.

“It’s probably not a record you’d put on in polite company, it’s got more of a solitary feeling; a strange kind of nostalgia. It has the same kind of pleasurable melancholy I felt growing up in Devon, with all those big empty spaces and deserted moors and beaches. I like that feeling a lot”.

You can hear a selection of the riverrun tracks now at the riverrun Facebook or Myspace pages: http://www.facebook.com/riverrunmusic and http://www.myspace.com/riverrun-danielland 

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ORDERING INFORMATION

The limited edition run of the riverrun album in a strictly limited edition of 50 is available to order now from http://www.riverrun.bigcartel.com for the reduced price of £9 (+p&p).

The package features a CD jewelcase edition of the album with extended liner notes and artwork throughout, a handwritten dedication inside the album, and delivery of the mp3s within 24 hours of the order.

This edition is hand-numbered and signed by Daniel Land and will be delivered in early February, two months ahead of the release date.

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LINKS

http://www.riverrun.bigcartel.com - to preorder the deluxe edition of the riverrun album

http://www.facebook.com/riverrunmusic - to hear streaming tracks and to become a fan of riverrun on Facebook

http://www.bfwrecordings.com/releases.php - for a free download of the riverrun album track “Hamworthy Common”

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Lewis approached me regarding doing a vocal, and I gladly accepted – it was actually the first time any other band had asked me to do a guest appearance, something I had been hoping to be asked to do for ages.

The backing track that he sent me instantly hooked me. For some (probably entirely subjective) reason synth melodies and type of rhythm used put me in mind of Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack for the film “Firestarter” (one of my favourite movies as a teenager) – a nice nostalgic feeling which ensured that I immediately felt at home “in” the piece.

I recorded a version of this vocal in about half an hour – and then spent about six weeks worrying that it was unfinished and generally not good enough. Thankfully Lewis’s positive response helped me overcome my natural doubts.

If you’re interested in having a listen, there are some tracks available to stream in Soundcloud format at Luga’s website: http://lugamusic.wordpress.com/

The fragmentation of rock/pop has been going on as long as I can remember, but it seemed to cross a threshold this decade. There was just so much music to be into and check out. No genres faded away, they all just carried on, pumping out product, proliferating offshoot sounds. Nor did musicians, seemingly, cease and desist as they grew older; those that didn’t die kept churning stuff out, jostling alongside younger artists thrusting forward to the light. It’s tempting to compare noughties music to a garden choked with weeds. Except it’s more like a flower bed choked with too many flowers, because so much of the output was good. The problem wasn’t just quantity, it was quantity x quality. Then there was the past too, available like never before, competing for our attention and affection. The cheapness of home studio and digital audio workstation recording, combined with the wealth of history that musicians can draw on and recombine, fuelled a mushrooming of quality music-making. But the result of all this overproduction was that “we” were spread thin across a vast terrain of sound. That’s why, if you look at the end-of-year or end-of-decade polls across the gamut of music magazines, there’s so little overlap. If even a relatively non-diffuse community like Pitchfork could only find its centre around records that came out in the early years of the noughties, it suggests that the culture-wide slide into entropy is speeding up.

This idea is actually addressed in one of the Pitchfork top 10 [album's of the decade] commentaries, on Arcade Fire’s 2004 album Funeral, which is their No 2 album of the decade. Ian Cohen writes: “Whether it’s due to increasingly fractious listening habits or the increased ability for dissenters to be heard, Funeral keeps on feeling like the last of its kind, an indie record that sounded capable of conquering the universe and then going on to do just that.” Pinpointing the blogosphere’s greatest liability (there’s no cool or ego-burnishing value to be generated from agreeing with other people) Cohen further notes that “the consensus hyperbole that met Funeral resulted in any record that threatened to reach that level becoming met with severe scrutiny or even outright derision”. He concludes, wistfully, that “still, we wonder if there will ever be anything quite like Funeral – something tells me that as music becomes even more readily available to us in the next decade, we’ll still go through it all in the hopes we can find something with the unifying force and astounding emotional payload that only albums like Funeral can provide”. What Cohen is saying here suggests that my two interpretations of Pitchfork’s slant to the early noughties may actually be more closely related than I’d thought: that musical value and consensus are intimately connected.

The UK innovations frequently seemed the best; yet, despite predictions to the contrary, virtually none of them crossed over and really made a dent beyond the specialist market. With a couple of exceptions (there’s an argument doing the rounds that a track by Britney Spears, of all people, bore a dubstep influence), none of them have impacted much on the way pop music sounds, in the way acid house or trance did. Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder began their careers rapping on east London’s grime scene, but they only really became household names when, for better or worse, they abandoned grime’s thrillingly edgy clatter and starting making commercial pop-rap.

Perhaps grime and dubstep were simply too abrasive and strange to be successfully watered down for mainstream tastes. Instead, they were big on the web. For all the talk of the MySpace-assisted success of Arctic Monkeys or Lily Allen, it’s hard not to think that one of the web’s biggest effects might actually be the opposite of the kind of will-of-the-people surge that powered those artists into the limelight. Instead, the net might have made music a more scattered, microcosmic experience, where a wealth of blogs and messageboards mean that anything, no matter how recherche, can find an audience – just not a stadium-filling, platinum-selling one.

In the future perhaps every artist will be famous for 15 comments. And perhaps we’ll never see mass movements like punk, Britpop or rave again, nor the kind of rupture in mainstream tastes that would baffle a time-travelling Top of the Pops viewer. It might not be the sort of progress we’re used to, but it would be progress nevertheless.

I will be releasing this music as a side project called riverrun, named (for symbolic and allusive reasons) after the first line of James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake.

I have set up a Myspace page for the project, where you can hear some of the tracks. It is http://www.myspace.com/riverrun-danielland

Sometime next year, when things relating to the Daniel Land & The Modern Painters album have settled down a bit, I’m hoping to put the riverrun album out on a small label. 

In the meantime, you can download a single from it – for free – from Brin Coleman’s ambient netlabel, BFW Recordings: http://www.bfwrecordings.com/releases/riverrun-HamworthyCommon.php

What record am I listening to?