The Vallum by Robert Dallas Gray

I remember the first time we visited St Blane's Chapel on the Isle of Bute; it felt like an immensely powerful place. It's been a site of religious worship since maybe 500 AD. It was a place I wanted to take in, to make a part of me. I stood at the vallum – the bank that bounds the ancient monastery – and imagined travellers arriving there a thousand years ago, across the same landscape I was standing in.

I take a guitar on family holidays and both The Vallum and Spiral came when we were on Bute; The Vallum came after a visit to St Blane's, as if I was charged with something that had to be released later. Those two songs felt like the core of something, and they sit together in the centre of this record.

On The Rain Room, some of the extra touches of organ and electric piano I added were played on virtual instruments, because I didn't have access to real ones. For this one I had my Yamaha YC20 and a Hohner Pianet; so everything is played in real time, in a real room. Not that I'm a purist, but it felt important to do that – to touch real instruments, interact with them.

This is a long, slow-moving record, and I hope it isn't too forbidding. I hope you can take the time to let yourself be inside it for a while; to stand with me, at the bank between the world inside and the world beyond it.

Solo guitar, mostly. Ex-Life without buildings, current Whin. He/him.

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