It's about cumulative charge
Working with Eamonn and Niall I am faced with an interesting dynamic. Composing for images in the context of a gallery space and in the context of a book are two very different propositions. The most important thing for me is that the music I make is not ‘soundtrack’. For me soundtrack implies a directive and prescriptive element, imposing or guiding a particular view, meaning or response. This is precisely what I want to avoid. Similarly, the music is not a direct response to the photographs, drawings, design or curation. Rather, I am positioning the music in proximity to these elements and allowing a mutual activation to occur. Our collaboration feels more like three parallel strands moving in sympathetic resonance. It’s about a cumulative charge and the particular tone of the new energy released.

Developed simultaneously to the End. book, the music for the End. installation at Les Rencontres D’Arles 2016 shares some material with the 7”, but is an expansion both spatially and thematically. Formally it comprises three independent but interrelated looping compositions of 6, 9 and 12 minutes, each of which occupies one of three interlinked spaces in the gallery. There is bleed between the three spaces. The three proportionate loops create a merging and overlapping flow as each composition modulates and shifts in relation to the others, ensuring an evolving variance as the visitor navigates the space. The work uses a richly nuanced sonic palette and a musical language both dense and spacious. Circular patterns of piano tone-clusters interplay with spectrally processed frequencies derived from small hand bells, singing bowls, tones generated via FM synthesis, and treated field-recordings. In the context of the curation and installation, there is a wonderful mutualism between the photos, the drawings, the music and the visitors navigating the space of the Espace Van Gogh.

The music that appears on the 7” vinyl of End. is specifically related to dance music, both a nod to D1 Recordings and a refraction of the stuttering rhythms of the book design. The prismatic curation of the images; the fluid imposition of the drawings; the commingling of format, material, texture, ink; now flowing, now arresting, relate to the cut-up multiform aesthetic of dance music and the joyful reveling in rhythm and tone for its own sake.

Taking a cue from the tableaux structure of the book design, each track is assembled as a series of vignettes, both inter-related and not, hinting at the arbitrary. They utilise elements of the sounds used in the End. installation and work them into a grid-based structure. Expansive spectral chords yield to tough syncopated bass-heavy beats. Manic metallic arpeggios run forwards and backwards – inverted and abutted, there is an unceasing flipping of rhythm and mood. Once each progression establishes itself it gives way to another. Rave-derived synth patterns appear and disappear. End. A resolves into a huge, euphoric finale of spectrally processed vocals over a glossy string major/minor chord progression and thumping distorted drum pattern. The polyrhythmic grooves of End. B yield to a frantic syncopated section of colliding arpeggios, pummeling kick drums and squealing synth, dropping to a coda of smooth heartsick ballad which cuts mid-phrase, emphasising a full stop.