Simon Scott is a British composer, mastering engineer and sound artist from The Fens in Cambridgeshire, England. A member of UK outfit Slowdive, his solo works include Soundings and Floodlines (Touch), Between (12k), Insomni (Ash International), and Below Sea Level (12k/TouchLine).
His latest album Long Drove is a beguiling suite of site specific textures, and gentle ambient sound that merges some really fascinating field recordings with elements of modular synth, loops and all manner of sonic trickery. It’s warm, beautiful and quite gentle. ‘The Black Fen’ is our first taste of it and we love how it gets progressively more distended and psychedelic without losing its warmth and gentle endearing nature. There’s a journey here.
This is what he has to say about the album:
“I regularly visit the remote and nameless broken bridge, that is situated over a long drainage ditch that connects Holme Fen and New Decoy nature reserves, simply to listen. Each season I’d return to observe the sonorities of wildlife merge and coalesce with the hum of the long telephone wires that stretch across the wide and flat Fens. Within my audition I’d perceive different sonic characteristics within the same location and I soon began to record its vast polyphonic glory. By pure serendipity my water bottle accidentally struck the steel bridge, and it rang out like a gong across the Fen landscape. This inspired me to use soft mallet beaters to actually play the bridge as a percussive musical instrument and capture its resonant qualities. A subsequent desire was also to place my tiny DPA microphones inside one of the bridge vertical openings to act as a filter of the many sonorities within and outside of the metal bridge. The vibratory aural qualities of the bridge would differ depending on what part of the bridge I struck and what season it was.”
Long Drove will be released via Room40 on the 20th of January 2023. You can find it here.
