separate journeys by spike mason & the adjective noun

The separate journeys album has been a long time in coming. It was originally recorded 12 years ago at the Aphek studio that is owned by my friend and recording engineer Greg Dixon.

Back then, a group of my close musician friends and I would play weekly at a improvised free music event called FREE FOR ALL. The event had a strict no recording rule but I had wanted to capture some of the beautiful sounds that I was hearing each week. As it happened, Greg was just finishing off his studio and had asked me if I could bring some musicians in to record in it, and I did. My friend Barney Wakeford played piano, Andrew Lorien played trumpet, Aris Kartsonas played guitar and Gabe Hons played percussion. Even though I had also planned to record myself on saxophones for some reason we never got round to it.

I had wanted to capture spontaneous playing and so created some sonic soundscapey backing tracks – with textures and rhythms and chords and so on – that I played for the musos to respond to. (These backing tracks were never intended to be part of the album, they were just used to provide a link between the improvisations.) What I captured was their first take musical responses. I ended up with many hours of beautifully free music.

And then I lost the discs – for 10 years!

When I eventually found them, for I had simply put them in a silly place, I discovered the joy of the music all over again. The changes in music technology meant that I could mix the tracks in my own home studio. I began the long task of creating pieces out of the hundreds of musical snippets I had available. I also began learning some of the free melodies and playing them on saxophone in unison with the tracks so that the pieces would sound composed. It was a lot of fun, there were so many choices that could be made in an instant, and yet I had a lot of time to consider another path or process if I desired to change anything. Two more years of home studio fun and it was done.

This is the 3rd album in my 10 albums in 10 years project.

improvising musicianer and composer

- playing the saxophone since before the internet was invented...

spikemason.com