The Five Seasons suite takes the listener on a cinematic journey through twelve soundscapes of ambient collage.
‘I felt the desire to create an assemblage of works unencumbered with words, a series of sound-scapes to allow the listener to create their own imagery.’
Each season is associated with the elements: Spring with Wood, Summer with Fire, Late Summer with Earth, Autumn with Water, Winter with Metal.
When in harmony the elements support each other in a creation cycle: Water nourishes wood, wood feeds fire, fire creates earth, earth produces metal, and metal produces water through condensation. But when the elements are out of balance, they have the capacity to damage each other. In the destructive cycle, water extinguishes fire, wood separates earth, metal chops wood, fire melts metal, and earth absorbs water.
And holding this all together is Cosmic Glue.
‘Five Seasons’ utilises archive sound from my collected international recording sessions gathered over the past four decades. Treated piano, cello, violin, saxophone, harmonicas, guitars and voices have been pieced together to reflect the seasons and the elements in a series of sound collages that exist between the ears.
'The results are a departure from my song-writing, but since owning my first reel to reel in the late 1950s, I have been obsessed with the power of sound to convey images often more vivid and engaging than image itself. I grew up in an age of radio, where the simplest audio device could convey the razing of a city to the ground by fiery inferno, or the other worldly sounds of life on the edges of our universe. To create a work free of words or song forms has been a liberating experience and one, I hope, the listener will enjoy.'