Nocturnal Machines by Marc Kellaway

I have always been fascinated with the blurring of boundaries in sound - between the acoustic and the electric, the real and the artificial. For me this is closely related to the hours shifting between day and night, where the relation between sight and sound also becomes more uncertain. Drum machines sounding like birds. Birds sounding like synthesizers. Field-recordings abstracted into beats or drones.

This also relates to some very specific memories: A night time ferry trip past an outside food market closing up, empty of people but coloured lights still on. The yellow glow inside an aquarium filled with underwater plants. Vague activity and blinking lights from a construction site glimpsed on a walk one foggy winter evening.

The starting point for the album was a series of mutating rhythmic sketches made on the semi-modular Pulsar-23 drum machine. I wanted to explore the area between texture and rhythm, still keeping some kind of forward motion while not necessarily defaulting to fixed rhythms.

These I brought to a series of sessions with my friend Mikkel and his prepared piano. We worked with traditional piano preparations with screws and dampers, excited the strings with small motors sometimes also interacting with chains of paperclips, and even recorded the raw sound of the mechanical parts themselves.

The sounds gathered this way had a close textual affinity with the organic percussive sounds produced by analoge means on the Pulsar. Blended further with field-recordings of a more percussive character - like the recordings of a staircase at my workplace - the album slowly started to take shape.

Further instrumental recording sessions moved things in new directions. The addition of sax added an unexpected almost jazzy tone to some of the tracks, furthering the nocturnal connection in a different way. Electric organ and guitar-scapes provided a more dense and noisy edge as a counterpoint to the more meditative tracks.

In the end it all cohered into this mostly peaceful, slightly uncategorizable album, the various strands held together by a shared feeling of vaguely abstracted dreaminess. A 58 minute drift though 8 nocturnal landscapes.

I hope you find some friendly and interesting spaces to explore here.

For more than two decades Marc Kellaway has been a central part of the Copenhagen experimental music scene.

Beside the solo releases he play organ in the psychedelic noise rock band Distotion Girls, and releases dubbed out techno EPs as The Exquisite Test Center.