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Journeys taken; distances covered; time traversed; destinations contemplated. One way or another we are all always travelling with just the merest glimpse of where we’re heading. My latest album, Journeyland, is inspired by these thoughts and experiences and mirrors many of my own personal journeys. Each of the tracks blends acoustic piano recordings with electronic and/or orchestral sounds, as well as some sampled sounds from the natural world.
I played my grandparents’ grand piano when I was growing up and had piano lessons at school, but I was sometimes bored by these and rarely worked to improve my classical training or sight reading. I continued to play from time-to-time, never really improving much except for one thing that always seemed to come quite naturally, that being an ability to improvise. My final piano teacher was a concert pianist whose real love was jazz and contemporary music. He picked up on my lack of a disciplined classical approach immediately but instead of pushing me to practice reading music, he started teaching me how music is built. How keys are not limited to major and minor but exist in many forms and how chords and harmony can be created and experimented with.
It was this very creative approach to teaching that resulted in my continuing to play and improvise, although often with big gaps, sometimes of years, from not having regular access to an instrument. More recently, my parallel interest in electronic music has opened up a seemingly limitless landscape of possibilities, particularly when combined with acoustic recording.
