‘The Morning’ is an anthology of three works by Paul Whitty to released by Metier in May 2023. ‘Nature is a language – can’t you read?’ written for Icebreaker is a reorganisation or reconstruction of materials from Michael Gordon’s Yo Shakespeare, a classic of visceral, dri-ving rhythmic patterns from Icebreaker’s repertoire. The reorganisation here is by turns sparsely then densely populated with points of sound and fragments of grit and noise generated by overheard field recordings, that lurch into life then vanish.
‘I was bored before I even began’ is an exploration of the sounding surfaces of instruments wielded by members of [rout] and each fitted with a contact microphone and routed to guitar pedals while ‘The Morning’ is a reconstructed, reorganised, reconstituted misreading of Thomas Arne’s Cantata No.5 developed as part of Vauxhall Pleasure, a project developed with Anna Best, and investigating the sonic archaeology of the Vauxhall Cross Gyratory, former site of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens where, for a time, Arne was composer in residence.
The sounding archaeology of Vauxhall Cross gyratory and Thomas Arne; the reconstruction of a post-minimalist classic; and the grit and noise captured by contact microphones and distortion pedals meet on this anthology of compositions from Paul Whitty performed by Icebreaker and [rout].