Blue Air by Coppice Halifax

"Blue Air" is a single for/from the forthcoming Coppice Halifax album Mountain Interval, containing one LP track and four outtakes/alternative mixes as b-sides, all of which were excised from Mountain Interval for runtime limitations only. In this way, the "Blue Air" single isn't really a single at all, so much as a sibling to the main album being utilized in a more surface-level promotional capacity.

The music offered here happened, for the most part, incidentally. All of it, save for two tracks, stemming from a single illuminating session with my third variant of the invaluable Ornament and Crime multipurpose module in my Audioholistics modular system. This third version of Ornament differs from the first two I possess, bearing a much more powerful processor that transforms the machine from more of a voltage and clock utility into a four-channel synthesizer/drum machine/effects processing workstation, sort of like half of my beloved Yamaha QY-70, in Eurorack format. From nothing more than preliminary testing of this machine came an entirely unexpected album of work, and although I should not be surprised when this happens, twenty years into my creative process, it nonetheless always comes on like a strange lucid moment, as if I was away from my body while the work happened, and returned just in time to hear it emanating from my speakers.

Once the core idea of the album was in hand, it only needed to be finished by way of careful editing and augmentation. Overdub and arrangement sessions followed, using a wealth of virtual and physical machines that each occupy a distinct space in my studio, making the music you hear something that could only exist in the here and now of Coppice Halifax. This stands in contrast to the recent Shades of Night in Green Minor album, which mostly existed several years in the past before being brought to the surface. "Blue Air" and Mountain Interval are instead the shape of Coppice Halifax music today.

To be sure, many of my dearest influences from the world of rhythmic and psychedelic electronic music loom large over these pieces - Rod Modell, Stephen Hitchell, Stefan Betke, Wolfgang Voigt, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Thomas Brinkmann, Terre Thaemlitz, Erik Kowalski, Olaf Dettinger, Richard D. James, just to name a handful who all cast shadows over the way my music comes to life. Without their stellar contributions to the public consciousness, I don't really think this music would exist. Further, my friend, mentor and all-around guru David Burraston deserves individual thanking here, as it has been at his encouragement alone that I have delved into so many of these specific machines and their processes.

It is my sincere hope that "Blue Air" and the subsequent Mountain Interval album satisfy those who feel that Coppice Halifax has remained a bit more withdrawn over the last two years. I myself have felt that way about it, unsure of how or why it happened. I've just chalked it up to Milieu's extensive work with procedural ambient forms and the absolutely exhaustive gauntlet of making Watch the Head, but as always, it could simply be that Coppice Halifax music needed to disappear only so it could return, as Wolfgang Voigt once wisely stated.

Analog Botany, since 2005.12.08. Impressionist techno and bedroom fantasist electronics. Compost instead of composition.

I also release music as Milieu: milieumusic.bandcamp.com

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