Mountain Interval by Coppice Halifax

"Mountain Interval" is the newest Coppice Halifax full-length effort in the field of melodious and rhythmic electronic music - be that house, dub, one of dozens of variations of techno, or whatever other record-shop-bin label you'd need to use to describe it for the layman. It is music composed with computers, drum machines, synthesizers and a wide array of processors in the modular and hardware/software worlds. These nine tracks pick up directly where things like "River Mural" and "Transient Logics" have signed off, offering once again an album that, in one moment, will sound like a Halifaxian acre, and in the next, may recall another scenic overlook from a Milieu recording.

In that sense, "Mountain Interval" is very much about the oscillation that lies at the heart of all things - up/down, on/off, left/right, yes/no, open/closed, zero and one - and in my usual way of working, I like to further explore those oscillations in more prosaic ways - positive and negative, here to there, happy and sad, new and old, fast and slow, Summers and Winters, Autumns and Springs. The sinewave that moves time from point to point and space from hill to valley and back again. Coppice Halifax has always been an elementally driven project, named in equal halves of seven letters each for the land and the sea, which is apt here too. Leaving home, and coming back again - the transient logic that brings us to tomorrow, and allows us to reduce the present moment to something behind us.

You will find, I hope, all of those things and more in these colorful soundwaves, in music that I made initially in a stoned and impulsive environment, chasing joy and endorphin release without looking at the clock or thinking about an album, a product, a job or anything else that our current era tells us should be our focus. When I first went to bed with the fruits of that first session, these tracks were only loops of simple drums/bass/chords, a little delay trail panning them around, nothing more. I enjoyed those versions enough that I was tempted to just release them as they were, always wanting to make my contribution to the great canon of electronic minimalism alongside the masters like Modell, Hitchell, Voigt, James and so many others that have been coloring my headphones and bedrooms for many years now.

But that wouldn't have been "Mountain Interval" - not really. The work that sits before you now had to be excavated from under, behind and between those loops, and in some cases, when I had dug too deep beneath the foundations I laid, I had to supplement, augment and amalgamate with new structures. Somewhere in there, the usual conversations happened - what to add, what to remove, and when - and like all good dub albums, "Interval" passed through around a dozen different iterations, some additive, some subtractive, some simply re-colored or tinted with contrast tools, some rearranged like the modular system that bore them.

All of this is the fun part, the chasing of glimpses, the optimism of wandering across the landscape, forever curious about what lies on the other side of the hill, hopeful that it is something new, but somehow still comforted when it is not, and in between those places, a moment at the top, closer to the clouds, like the crest of a wave that can hold us for as long as we want it to, while we look further out than before, and see all the other intervals moving around us - day to night, beginning to end - realizing when we finally begin to clamber down the path ahead that they have both always been there, a perfectly symmetrical superposition, a harmony of life to a lovely tune, as Brooks Bowman once beautifully wrote in 1934.

I hope you'll let me carry you through these nine colorful bends again, as I myself have worn down their footpaths as I lost myself in their tangles for the last year. At a time when life is not nearly as imitative of art as we'd like it to be, I flee into the latter, and to date, it has never failed to make up the difference that I need it to make.

Analog Botany, since 2005.12.08. Impressionist techno and bedroom fantasist electronics. Compost instead of composition.

I also release music as Milieu: milieumusic.bandcamp.com

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