Ben Chatwin will release new album 'Drone Signals' in September, listen to 'Bone' now
31.07.18
Following soon after the release of July's invigorating 'Staccato Signals', Ben Chatwin will release a companion album of related compositions entitled 'Drone Signals', available from September 14th.
Feeding strings through an array of modular synthesisers and utilising modern sampling and granular synthesis, Ben Chatwin remoulds ‘Staccato Signals’ into new microscopic electronic textures.
Unlike the original album, where Ben started with a blank slate and built the music up layer by layer finishing with the string quartet, this time the process began with everything on hand. The task became dismantling the tracks – stripping them apart to see what was left, letting certain sounds or instruments become the focus and then rebuilding the arrangements around them.
This allowed elements to breathe, yet also to become more static. The less chaotic and more ambient nature of these pieces suggested a related album of versions – a conceptual sibling.
In this way, ‘Drone Signals’ might best be understood as the aftermath of ‘Staccato Signals’, retaining much that made the latter such a rewarding album: its mournful beauty, the tense, ambiguous relationship between electronic and acoustic elements, and a delicate if not volatile balance between elegance and intensity. However this time, the palette is broader and more static - more concerned with monolithic structures than with sharp edges.
Listen to first taste 'Bone' below.
"With 'Bone' I removed everything but the string quartet part from 'Fossils' and started to record new parts around it. Unlike most of the other tracks on 'Drone.' this too became a thickly textured track as I again engulfed the strings with a variety of synthetic textures allowing the strings to rise above it all for a brief moment towards the end of the track, resulting in what is probably the most dramatic moment on the album."
- Ben Chatwin