Cornutopia Music

About this album

Cycles & Shadows is a culmination of over a year of new musical exploration in musical structures, and continual live piano performances. Influences include artists as diverse as Sparks, Scott Walker, David Lynch, Kate Bush, and Beethoven; but all peripheral. Musically, this is a substantial evolution.

The album consists of two distinct halves. Cycles is essentially a piano concerto in six movements for synthetic orchestra. It was born from the Cycles art performance developed for Chester Cathedral in September 2016, and is an examination of information and structures in music, and a comparison with different biological structures and states. A simple theme is explored in different ways that echo the life-cycle of a cell or organism.

Shadows, the second half of the album, consists of songs with unusual structures. Influenced by contemporary freeform poetry, the songs follow the same improvisational style, using words and music to convey meaning and emotion in a depth that is unusual in modern songs.

Shadows is thematically about ageing, childlessness, and the redeeming power of art. Musically, different keys and themes are explored and later revisited and transformed in a joyous conclusion, something that both Shadows & Cycles have in common.

Technically this was the first of Mark's albums to be recorded in 32-bit quality, created using his custom-designed synthesizer and sequencer, Prometheus. Many new recording techniques were used for this album, and part of the challenge in creating Cycles & Shadows was technical, processing large quantities of live recordings for the first time, often pushing to the limits of the technology. The software required additional programming to add new functionality, often functions designed to wrestle control from the cold computer and place in back into human hands.

The piano playing was live, and much the composition work involved using the piano recordings as the skeleton, with other instruments carefully layered over these parts like a gossamer collage, always aiming to retain the mood and feeling of the live performance.