Cornish Music #1 I had been thinking about cultural identity, the idea of belonging (socially, culturally and geographically) and the idea of cultural ownership. This subject comes up over and over again in political discourse but in recent times it has reached fever pitch. The arguments pertaining to this subject can be applied at a macro and microcosmic level but for this project I’ve been thinking about it all on quite a local level.
I began by writing some words that gave vent to some of my feelings about Cornwall (my home), it’s culture and history – or that is to say its official culture and history and my, and my family’s, relationship to that. I had these words translated in to the Cornish language. By this I mean Kernewek as opposed to Cornish dialect.
Working from a melodic fragment of mine, I collaborated with the singer Bec Applebee to devise a melody for the Cornish words. The resulting tune has an idiomatic mixolydian Celtic folk music flavour. We worked hard to make this melody as satisfying as we could and to record it as well as possible. From that moment on, I treated the recording as if it were a piece of found sound – an audio artefact dug up from somewhere. I then set about a process of burying it so that it would be almost completely hidden.
Blues Per I Morti is a piece scored for 3 keyboard synthesisers, percussion and 2 electric guitars. One of the guitars is played with bottleneck slide and E-bow.
How Long Would You Wait? is a film that was commissioned by the NHS Early Intervention Team as part of an online campaign. Made in collaboration with film-maker Hana Backland for Effervescent
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