Scott Gordon

Relief Tours

Image of Scott Gordon - Relief Tours
Record Label
Esk

About this item

Glasgow's Esk follows up their album from Jim Coulter with a new long player from Scott Gordon. Highly recommended for lovers of all things drone n' ambient and the second crushingly epic album to be released this week, alongside the new Gas LP. A composition of treatments for adapted piano harp and electric guitar it sees the source material taken to the very farthest extreme of its original origin, yet still somehow maintains its biotic nature despite the onslaught of DSP.

'In 2016, I managed to salvage a piano that belonged to my brother and had spent four years sitting in a garage. Getting it home nearly killed my van. The first objective was to strip the harp and mount surface transducers to it with the hope of being able to excite the strings and ultimately explore a tuneable sympathetic reverb. After a lot of trial and error, workable results were produced which became the foundations for "Relief Tours". The album was recorded over six months or so with tracks typically centering around one or two objects - some kind of treatment for the piano and improvisations on electric guitar. Experimenting with the objects is never something I’ve been particularly scientific about by any means, nothing more than the basic sequence of continuing to develop the best results that had emerged from the previous experiment. Concepts were typically very simple e.g. getting percussive overtones from the piano strings. My usual approach is to sketch some possible methods then just begin, so in this case it was tugging winds of horse hair and then settling on an angle of about 30°. This produced the deep bell like sound that can be heard on "Benthic Salvage".

'Certain sounds would often dictate the course of things. For example, the juddering of a rubber ball being dragged down a smooth surface would, in turn, result in trying to recreate the same percussive movement on the piano harp with a car spring and some big magnets, which then went on to provoke something else and so on. The results would influence the next decision and eventually a track would begin to take shape. Each track hosts a small group of related ideas like this with the tonal work often being the last stage - improvised reactions to the textural parts.

'The physicality and movement of the sounds, and the instrument-like properties that came from experimenting with objects, both sonically and tangibly, were really the driving force behind the record.' - Scott Gordon

TRACK LISTING

A1. Benthic Salvage
A2. Shake Mountain Chain
A3. Arid Scutter
A4. Wetland Forms
B1. Sea Weather
B2. Into Tropic
B3. Throats
B4. Island Dissolve

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