Ten years ago in April 2013, the Leaf Cloak album was published, and both symbolically as well as aesthetically began what I now consider my post-Analog Botany phase of Coppice Halifax recordings. The album's sessions were long and varied, yielding no less than two full-length albums of original takes, a remix album and a beatless ambient companion piece, as well as numerous stray mixes that would be released piecemeal in the years to come. Somewhere in that frenzied process, I'd begun work on yet another variant of the Leaf Cloak sound, bringing together samples from all prior versions into a new set of shapes that would feel familiar, but also sit apart from the rest of the mixes. These pieces would never be finished until this year, as I approached the tenth anniversary of the Leaf Cloak album, and now they have finally arrived - a Blue Cloak, aptly named from beneath the downpours of this very rainy Spring season.
Blue Cloak is three sidelong (in vinyl terms) assemblages of ambient music, analog textures and noise, dub rhythms and basslines, and a wealth of filter-warped and delay-spattered chords. It was created using elements from all six Leaf Cloak tracks, tape loops harvested from the Chemist Cloak bent-cassette dubs and even some of the hardware that was used on the original sessions, such as the Roland SH-32 synthesizer and the Korg ER-1/Boss DR-660/DR-880 drum machines.
The resultant recordings accomplish finally what I set out to do a decade ago, to make deeper and more tangential pieces of dubby atmosphere and groove that referred to Leaf Cloak in topical ways, while also using the parts and processes to create completely new sounds. In many ways, I am glad I did not finish the work I started until now, as my current fascinations with polymetric sequencing and generative synthesis have helped to inform the work in ways that would simply not have been possible all those years ago.
Blue Cloak is also intended as a herald for the imminent Leaf Cloak reissue set that I hope to complete preparations for by the end of Summer. The plan is to assemble a box set that collects Leaf Cloak, Ash Cloak and Chemist Cloak alongside Blue Cloak and perhaps a fifth disc of stray mixes and other ephemera from the period. The beatless fantasist pastorale Mistmorning, a split project with close friend and frequent collaborator Zwei Kreise, will also see a reissue, which may or may not include expanded material also. For the moment, Blue Cloak felt appropriate to be issued ahead of these arrangements, for the Spring season, and simply as a proper album in its own right.
Happy Spring from Coppice Halifax, and I hope you'll join me in wishing Leaf Cloak a happy tenth anniversary also!
credits
released May 5, 2023
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at Botany Bay (tape loops and skeletal arrangements) in 2013, with the lion's share of the session work recorded at White Pillar, 2023. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text by Brian. Design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number ABX130. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2023. All nights preserved.
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