Deep Listening 2019 - 2022 features the best of Richard Norris' recent ambient, downtempo and deep listening music.

This reflective, meditative take on electronic music has been a daily practice for the musician for some years, and has resulted in numerous releases on the Group Mind and Inner Mind labels. Included are a number of 'Music For Healing' tracks, part of an ongoing series of releases specifically created for relaxation and anxiety relief. The results have been quite phenomenal. People have given birth to this music, and there have been many reports of people using this music to help anxiety, stress and bereavement.

Richard Norris is well known for his work with Soft Cell's Dave Ball in the Grid, and Erol Alkan in Beyond The Wizards Sleeve, as well as many solo releases, productions and remixes. He has been called 'the electronic musician's electronic musician', and the results are all over this double album, with warm analogue bubble baths heavily featured. Dive in... 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: LOVE a bit of Richard Norris, and this collection sees some of his best work collected together for a Deep Listening monolith. The series was a source of constant joy and relaxation for me during the pandemic, so it's great to see a summary of the myriad pieces collected together so perfectly. An essential collection for any ambient fans.

TRACK LISTING

1. Eighty Eight
2. December
3. Cornflower
4. Borders
5. I Know How You Feel
6. Through The Window
7. January
8. Four
9. Ultramarine
10. June
11. Nine
12. Grains Of Light
13. In A Heartbeat
14. The Golden Age
15. Deep Orange
16. One
17. Signal To Power
18. Super Wolf Moon
19. Two
20. Space

Group Listening’s brilliant first album, ‘Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works, Vol. 1’, was a haunting, meditative and lovingly considered selection box of musical reworkings. It featured rearranged tracks by the likes of Arthur Russell, Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt. But it was also much more than that. In making this record of reimagined musical works, Stephen Black (clarinet) and Paul Jones (piano) were two musicians doing what all music fans do: comparing favourite tracks, turning each piece over for new meaning and developing a musical understanding of each other in the process.

Fast forward a couple of years, a remix album of ‘Vol. 1’, 12” ‘What’s A Girl To Do?’ - featuring a re-work of the Fatima Yamaha club staple - an EP of rearrangements with Cate Le Bon from her LP ‘Reward’ and a remix of Lambchop’s ‘This Is What I Wanted To Tell You’ and the pair started ‘Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 2’ from an altogether different vantage point.

“We’ve done a lot more work together now and so have developed certain ways of working. Because these processes have become norms, it’s spurred us on to push things a bit further and to avoid repeating ourselves,” they say.

Whereas their first record was put together over an intense three-day period in a hired-out studio, ‘Vol. 2’ saw the pair having to work around various pandemic lockdowns. This meant taking over Jones’ living room, where they gradually put its ten tracks together between September last year until March of this. They would record one or two songs over a couple of days then pause for the week, building and ruminating on ideas; it allowed the music take on a more ambitious nature - albeit within the chosen pairing of piano and clarinet - but also took in all the bits of chat, traffic noise and other creaks and squeaks of a home recording.

“I like to think that ‘Vol. 2’ starts where ‘Vol. 1’ ends” Black says. “Paul and I allowed ourselves the time and freedom to explore and experiment with the recording process and the song selection itself.”

Taken as a whole, there’s a gorgeous ambience to the record but that shouldn’t be confused for ‘Vol. 2’ being an ambient listen. The organic understanding that Black and Jones have of each other’s processes as musicians means that the music sounds incredibly fluid, but the overall tranquillity of the record is made up of dozens of small nuances. It’s a puzzle that’s been put together just below the surface as the duo react with a warm emotion to the songs they’ve chosen.

It’s in the way that Group Listening are able to prod, probe and contort the self-defined parameters that they’ve set themselves that makes ‘Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 2’ such an intriguing listen - and it’s the love and care they’ve taken over it that makes these versions entirely their own.

TRACK LISTING

Sunset Village
Blue Crystal Fire
Y Cwsg
Hollywood Dream Trip
Take Care
Camberwick Green
All Of A Sudden
This Was Us
Five Hundred Miles
Sealand