Vigil by Alf Jackson

The Recording


This album is anything but a high-definition, studio produced sonic experience. Rather, it’s a rough gem. The kind that’s beauty glints through the dirt on its face after being pulled out of the earth and stashed in the pocket of my tattered, sun-faded shorts on a walk to no destination in particular.

What you’re about to hear was recorded in an abandoned quarry. The location, aside from being chosen for its awesome acoustics, tells part of the story of Bruny Island and holds deep significance for both me and dear friend and long-time collaborator Julius Schwing, founder of Isthmus Records.

Choosing to set out on this project alone made for some interesting challenges that site- specific works often do. The combination of technical issues with my recording gear, and breeze blowing into the microphones, it left me only with this fourteen(ish)-minute recording that was salvageable for release.

The music however speaks strongly enough that I’m more than satisfied to make it my first ‘official’ solo drumset album release. Rust and all, I couldn’t be happier with what could be saved from this session and shared with the world.

The process of recording this album was all documented, you can watch it here:
https://youtu.be/mEooLLabDkQ?si=kC53-ru0VxvXREje


A Bit More Depth on the Music You're Hearing


This recording marks the closing of my artistic vigil on Bruny Island Tasmania. During this five-year sabbatical I experienced a heightened sensitivity to the events that are occurring constantly in nature.

Reducing the noise of the city brought a new clarity, and revealed layers of meaning in the things I’d been looking at the whole time.

It became apparent to me (on a level far more significant than previously) that numbers provide us ways of understanding deep cycles of nature, its formations and happenings. From cellular structures to terrestrial rhythms, dimensions, the cycles of the luminaries to the resonances in our solar system, it appears that we hang in a system that’s “in tune”.

I began to study the growth patterns in the formations of the natural world. The way nature expresses its efficiency, and at times what appears to be its utterly pointless yet tear-jerking beauty, and it can be somewhat understood through geometry and numbers.

I woke up to the fact that abundant number sequences, ratios and formulas surround me, just waiting to be expressed by my drumming through rhythmic cycles, subdivisions, tempos, frequencies and anything that I could quantify.

This brought me personally an astonishing significance to what I play. The gumtree now expresses new ways I can stack rhythms. Rudimentary measurements: the speed of light, days in a year, anything quantifiable spurs me to harmonize the measures, tempos, ratios in my musical rhythm system in all ways I can make manifest.

My new found cosmic thread, leading me along an intuitive process of discovery, has transmuted my music into a celebration of the beauty this system expresses. The closest I can imagine a true prayer.

The human design came under my umbrella of research during this time, and in the attempt to express this new-found language to the fullest my practice became heavily physical. I developed the bodily endurance so that I may go down through the levels of awareness when I play, deep enough that the heart becomes the place of emanation. It’s in the ‘deep- water’ where the unexplainable occurs and that’s where my music comes from.

From the journeys of the ants, the sky battles between the hawks and ravens, the geometric growth patterns in the flora, the whales basking in the bay. The mosses, ferns and mushrooms. The campfires shared with Julius Schwing. The revelations and discourse with Julius’s family. The tonnes of stone heaved, dead trees to firewood, digging for gold (potatoes) with Justus. Submerging in the icy creeks, and belly-breathed stomping through the high-grounds bare-footed, near naked, steaming in the depths of winter. A glowing cabin of pine and blue lotus tea, feasts by candlelight, antlers, animal skulls and precious stones. The cycles of life, death and repurpose, the unescapable presence of the elements. The love, loss and forgiveness.

This album is a tribute to all of it.

Alf

Wild music from a wild place. Welcome to the home of Julius Schwing’s creative music label Isthmus Music. Julius is an improvising guitarist and composer based on Bruny Island, Lutruwita/Tasmania.

isthmus-music.com
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