Four Facts About Immovable Transition II

August 2020

This new version of Immovable Transition—reworked from the 2012 original—has been ready for over a month but it’s taken me this long to get it together and write some liner notes for it. In between times not only does the cultural landscape feel different, everything feels different; I feel different.  

As I think about this point, now,—a summer of not only action, counter-action, protest and defiance, but also of learning, healing and education—this work seems somehow trivial and inconsequential. However, it merits some form of explanation, and I will try to do so in as simple and straightforward a way as I can.

The first thing to know about Immovable Transition is that it is in the format of a singular. I’ll write more about what that is separately (note to self), but basically a singular is a 20-minute listening piece, divided into three singulars, and is designed for listening to while walking. It wasn’t my intention for this to be the first singular, that’s just how it has happened. 

The second thing to know about Immovable Transition is that it is a reworking of an earlier piece, also called Immovable Transition, and all the recordings are from that earlier sound installation. However, the musical elements are new, as is the arrangement, selection, editing and mixing. I decided to rework the original as I was listening through some of my field recordings and came across these original recordings, which include field recordings in and around trains stations in Yorkshire, as well as a number of sound effects recorded in a studio. I felt that there was more I wanted to express with this piece and these sounds, hence this new version.

The third thing to know about Immovable Transition is that I’m extremely happy with it. It expresses my intentions for the whole project much more forcibly, eloquently and creatively than the original, and there is a clarity that emanates from having more confidence over my ideas, tools and materials.

The fourth thing to know about Immovable Transition is that it inhabits both a musical world and a field recording/soundscape world, and that my intention was to reserve space for you, the listener, to enter its world; its pace, rhythm, aesthetic, without the need to interrogation, to understand.

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