23 by Wil Bolton
'For my interpretation of Courier’s 23 musical ideas in 23 minutes concept, I took inspiration from a series of walks I made throughout 2023 near my home in East London. For these walks, I would follow the London Overground railway arches around Leyton, Walthamstow and Forest Gate, fascinated by the mixture and contrast of old and new businesses located beneath the train lines, from mechanics and scrap merchants to micro breweries and artisanal bakeries.
During these walks I also took a set of 23 photographs of these arches and made occasional field recordings on my iPhone. Back in my studio, I combined these lo-fi field recordings of forklift trucks, drilling, welding, pigeons, freight trains, traffic, muffled conversation and birdsong with modular synthesizer sequences and drones, looped Mellotron melodies and effects pedals.'
The album will be released in an edition of 23 and each CD is unique in that the artwork is one of these 23 photographs.
Tracklist
| 1. | Freight | 0:19 |
| 2. | Arches | 1:16 |
| 3. | Boarded Up | 1:41 |
| 4. | Ivy | 0:46 |
| 5. | Sidings | 1:07 |
| 6. | Mesh | 0:49 |
| 7. | Hazards | 0:20 |
| 8. | Underpass | 0:55 |
| 9. | Bakers Arms | 1:30 |
| 10. | Reclaimed | 0:58 |
| 11. | Overgrown | 1:05 |
| 12. | Hitchcock | 0:54 |
| 13. | Unauthorised | 0:36 |
| 14. | Padlocks | 0:49 |
| 15. | Box Frame | 0:53 |
| 16. | Reflected | 0:54 |
| 17. | Pallets | 1:10 |
| 18. | Buddleia | 1:28 |
| 19. | Scrapped | 1:07 |
| 20. | Cann Hall | 0:41 |
| 21. | Nest | 1:03 |
| 22. | Railings | 0:40 |
| 23. | Along The Tracks | 1:59 |
Credits
Mastered by Ian Hawgood
License
All rights reserved.
Wil Bolton's work uses field recordings, found objects, modular and analogue synthesizers, guitars, acoustic instruments and effects to create warm and emotive melodies, fragmented and submerged among beds of droning ambient textures and environmental sounds.