I have been lucky enough to be invited to record drums and percussion at St. Mary’s Space over the years. The studio is located in the beautiful Mid-West of the Scottish Highlands and is hosted by close and long standing friends, Jamie and Charlotte Smith.
Jamie is a fantastic guitar player, composer and studio engineer (and chef!) while Charlotte’s skills are more from the visual and creative arts in photography, painting and, more recently, what Charlotte refers to as ‘crap taxidermy’! Their collective passions are very much in evidence as signatures in the amazing creative space they have built.
I had visited St. Mary’s socially for short breaks on a couple of occasions and was invited in 2018 by Jamie to record some drums for his own ‘sonic novel’, titled ‘Notes from a tremulous hand’. I had received demo recordings of the music some weeks prior and absolutely loved it! From the sleeve notes: ‘…Through the ears of a grotesque array of characters, a chamber punk romance of Wagnerian proportions unfolds, with mysterious shipwrecks, macabre musical rites, ‘pataphysical doings and sound and music at the dark heart of the narrative.’ A broad palette of musical endeavour, to be sure – and with a total final cut run time well in excess of four hours. And very little, to no compositional repetition, at all!
It’s a fascinating and fun listen that might just pull you into its eccentric world. https://www.tremuloushand.co.uk
Around this time, Jamie had also been working with BBC6 favourite, the fabulous British-Somali poet/rapper and ‘new-folk’ songwriter, Knomad Spock and his album ‘Winter of Discontent’. Jamie had played me some early recordings, which sounded just beautiful (do give the album a listen). He mentioned that Knomad might be interested to have me play on his next recordings and in 2021, I got the call for a return trip to Scotland to do just that – except this time, it was to record drums for not ‘an’ album, but TWO albums!
Knomad and Jamie had tracked and (mostly) mixed the basis of another album, for which I received recordings and, basically, had carte blanche to put down whatever parts I wanted (we might call this a ‘Carlsberg session’?!). I believe the premise was to have some fresh and totally outside input, away from their established duo methodology.
The music had, already, so much character. I used their train of textures, composition and lyrical content to inform all manner of drum set and percussion approaches and created super-basic ‘prompts’ (I wouldn’t call them ‘charts’!). Anything which stood out as a creative centre to focus on, while improvising to the pre-recorded songs. Three days had been allocated to record all of the drum tracks for both albums: Day 1 was given over to sound checking and pre preparation/briefing and tune listening. We then tracked all of album 1 on day 2. These recordings became a pool for the Knomad Spock album ‘A Darker Light’, which is out now via Bandcamp:
Day 3 was scheduled to track drums for what, during the sessions, was to become known as ‘album 2 – the third Knomad Spock album’! This project presented a particularly interesting approach – and typically so for Jamie and Knomad – as this album was to be written around the drum recordings. If the previous day’s session had been a blank canvas, today’s would dispense with any form of canvas altogether! We were simply filling silence with rhythm and texture as muse for Knomad to write and Jamie to dress the songs. I did have prior knowledge of this proposition for the session, and so, had hatched a plan to help with variety in creating percussive sketches and groove structures. I wanted to provide the project with as much breadth as I could muster. I have a background in songwriting and music composition and recognise the value of inspiration – wherever it might stem from. A few weeks prior to the sessions, I began to compile some of my favourite drum and percussion recordings from all corners of the music spectrum. My thinking was to play along with these tracks using an array of approaches: simple, complex, composed, improvised, soloistic, layered or just plain groovy – all manner of angles. I wanted to deliver as many options of source material as I could manage, with a core precept of the character in each take being strong enough to inspire the writing process.
I won’t break the spell by spilling the beans on the tunes I used, but there were Latin feels responding to Hermeto Pascoal, Airto and Stevie Wonder; Arabic groove reflections on the music of Rabih Abou-Khalil; jazz feels along to Coltrane, Kurt Rosenwinkel and even a passage with brushes inspired by a John Abercrombie tune. On some of the Latin grooves, I layered a lot of percussion, which on playback provided extra rhythmic variety for the mix and also a ‘floating’ sensation with the initial kit drum tracks muted.
These were proper working days! We would get up early and go straight into the action. By 5pm we were all rinsed of energy, but would carry on working through a second wind driven by the inspiring results of the day’s session (plus a few carefully selected beers!). Right after the final day’s recording, Jamie suggested we should pay a visit to Oban fish market and cook up a celebratory meal. I shall always remember the most amazing dinner we enjoyed that night – especially the giant fresh water oysters from the local honesty box.
…and haggis, neeps and tatties at the Drover’s Inn on the way home…
Watch out for the next releases from Knomad Spock!
Leave a Reply