group listening
Works

Released 10 May 2024 on PRAH Recordings

Catalogue number: PRAH065

Opt for the path less trodden — allow yourself to stray from it, even — and you might find, buried in the bracken, deep in the trees, a shining modernist monolith. Liquid as a mirror, glinting in the leaf-broken sun, it lies in wait off the beaten tracks of North Yorkshire, South Wales, or the A508 out of Milton Keynes. Or perhaps it is all of these places simultaneously and none of them: an amalgam of the wayside walks of the British Isles, accessed only by the maps of the mind. Heeding the call of the electric clarinet, the crooning song of a frog, you crunch across the forest floor, open the door, and step into the vigorous green, your edges shimmering as you ascend.

The monument’s acid-ambient architects are Paul Jones and Stephen Black — known jointly as the woodwind-and-key-wielding, sculptural-papier-mâché-hat-wearing Group Listening — and the bright cube is Walks, the duo’s third album. Following renegade reinterpretation records Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1 (2018) and Vol. 2 (2022), which pulled apart, pondered, and re-shaped cult ambient classics by the likes of Robert Wyatt, Arthur Russell and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Walks is Group Listening’s first volume of completely original compositions. Slipping out of their analogue skins, they have “embraced our electronic selves” says Black. Jones adds: “There’s no acoustic piano on the new record, and Steve’s playing an EWI, wind synth...our electronic avatars have risen.”

Though the pair have collaborated musically for the last decade — and have forged in that time an unspoken, innate musical interplay — the prospect of writing a record together from scratch required some figuring out. “When we started Group Listening, we liked this idea of it being quite classical for want of a better word, home-made classical” says Jones. “I used to joke about it sounding like a Naxos recording, you know...like a mid-price classical label, but as if Joe Meek had recorded it.” With Walks, he continues, “our process was intentionally different.” Initially it was messy, disparate strands, specks of ideas, rummaged from the files, folders and boxes of each of the duo’s phones, computers and brains — where field recordings, experimental home demos and notes-to-selves had been stashed for later, and mostly forgotten about. In a fashion Jones likens to a game of exquisite corpse, each half of the band would send improvisations, or the sketches of a composition, for the other to build upon, ferrying the bricks back and forth between their homes in Cardiff and Penarth until they had built an album’s worth of entirely self-played, produced, mixed and mastered tracks. Layered like soil or time, none of the compositions may necessarily be regarded as finished, and live iterations may see them further built or rearranged.

1.

Multilayered too is the record’s wide and wonderful list of inspirations: its writing informed by the saxophone of Sam Gendel, the “heightened naturalism” of a Martin Parr photograph; the clarity and site-specificity of Japanese ambient, environmental & new age music of the 80s and 90s (in particular that collected on Light in the Attic’s Kankyō Ongaku compilation) and, prominently, Robert Walser’s pseudo-biographical novella The Walk — an appreciation of the philosophical space gifted by walks to walkers. Much like the record’s artwork, created by Catrin James, these inspirations are cut and collaged together in freeform, bringing disparate landscapes into a beautiful, cohesive new plane.

The album opens on ‘51°29 09.6 N 3°12 30.6 W’, “Not really a track, but a portal into the weirdness” as Jones puts it; a beam of light which illuminates the way with its chimes and chirrups, reverberations and rustles from pondside in a Cardiff park. The lines between fictive and tangible worlds quickly blur: the exterior reality, where the band walked and talked together over and over — to relax between gigs, to serve as a meeting room for band business, or simply to conflab as friends — melding with the interior realities hewn by the music. Whether rural or urban, within the music or without, “it’s more about the poetry of places than the real places themselves” surmises Jones. ‘New Brighton’ simultaneously smells of the salt and wind of the seafront and an imagined nightclub on the Wirral; Jones and Black’s electronic avatars in full evidence as clarinet melodies circle over metallic, echoey beats and spilt drinks. ‘Hills End’, a mystical, gently undulating number both ancient and contemporary, which started life on a walk to Bolton Abbey, has “a slightly German Pagan feel to it” if you ask Black — “we’re walking up to the hill’s end, we get to the top and there’s a Pagan dance party”; or, if you ask Jones, it’s like “being in a car with Ralf and Florian from Kraftwerk, driving down the motorway.” ‘Shopping Building’ rides the escalator of a new-town-centre’s decaying mid-century complex in which the Muzak has been stored next to the Ethiojazz, becoming suffused with Addis Ababan warmth; percussion chirring like the legs of a cricket.

Indeed, the natural world is ever-present on Walks, crawling up its trouser legs, bedding into the cracks in the tarmac and cement. Field recordings, taken habitually by Jones on his phone “like a tourist taking pictures”, much in the spirit of Ernest Hood’s self-released 1975 record Neighborhoods, create a sonic portrait of the real-life landscapes traversed by the pair. ‘Frogs’ gurgles and gulps with eerie amphibian voices, mirroring them in gonglike strikes against the white noise of water. Elsewhere, wilderness is evoked figuratively. ‘Grey Swans’, initially light as an airborne feather, hides melancholia (and a despairing critique of late-stage capitalism) just below the waterline. ‘Pavane IX’ sounds like the creaking, stretching and morphing of a caterpillar inside a chrysalis, and ‘Old Reeds’, conjured more from wetland grasses than woodwind, “is in my mind a pop tune” says Jones — the kind of pop tune, perhaps, that would play from a portable radio as unearthly visitors tried their hand at pond- dipping, nets skimming water boatmen from their perfect surface tension.

Nowhere does the record display its sense of self more starkly than on closing track ‘Welcome to Denge’: an 8-minute, Harold Budd-inspired crescendo which positions the listener between the unruliness of the wild and the smoothness of concrete on a Kentish shore. Sonic mirrors, sentinels over Denge Beach, show the converging human and non-human worlds back to themselves, and to each other, in a loop — endless, yet constantly changing on the wind. It is a feeling that encapsulates Walks in its wider sense: an ode to the gently psychedelic potential of wandering around in some place, any place, every place: the places in one’s own mind, listening and thinking, slipping through the fabric of time a little or a lot, depending on how long you’ve got. To do so, to paraphrase Walser, is to glow and flower yourself in the glowing, flowering present.

Diva Harris, November 2023

Album Credits

Woodwind & wind synthesizer: Stephen Black
Electric piano, digital piano & synthesizers: Paul Jones
All compositions by Paul Jones & Stephen Black
All tracks produced by Paul Jones except –‘Hills End’ produced by Stephen Black & Paul Jones
Recorded in Cardiff, 2023
Cover art by Catrin James
Layout by Paul Rafferty
Mastered by Guy Davie at Electric Mastering

TRACKLISTING: 1)51°29 09.6 N 3°12 30.6 W 2)Mew Brighton 3)Shopping Building  4) Frogs 5) Hills End 6) Grey Swans 7) Old Reeds 8) Pavane IX 9) Welcome to Denge