Album of the Week: Andrew Thomas ‘Between Buildings & Trees’

Album of the Week: Andrew Thomas ‘Between Buildings & Trees’

5 March, 2010 | 5.09AM

• Written by: Beatportal
• Filed under: Music News: album of the week, ambient, andrew thomas, kompakt

From the cover art (see below, after the jump), you might guess that Andrew Thomas’ new album, ‘Between Buildings & Trees’, was a release on ECM, the iconic jazz and classical label, home to the likes of Keith Jarrett and Arvo Pärt. From the minimalist graphics to the moody, black-and-white landscape photography, the sleeve is a dead ringer for the imagery favored by the Munich-based institution, which has established one of contemporary music’s most clearly defined aesthetics in its 40 years of operation.

Actually, the album comes out on a different German label, but one that, in its own way, is just as iconic: Cologne’s Kompakt. Thomas is a mainstay of the label’s annual Pop Ambient series, having featured on the compilation every year since 2004. This is his third album for the label, and it’s a gorgeous, easygoing, highly approachable example of Thomas’ contemplative electro-acoustic collage work.

Ironically, the music itself could almost be mistaken for an ECM record, given its downy beds of strings, its ruminative piano melodies and its endless canyons of echo. Despite the subdued digital glitches—a trace of the ‘Clicks + Cuts’ movement of a decade ago—this is ambient music at its most timeless. Influenced by Brian Eno’s explorations of space and stasis, its airy tones cycle as naturally as the suspended shapes of an Alexander Calder mobile.

Andrew Thomas ‘A Dream of a Spider’

Thomas sounds pleased when I suggest the connection to him. “Yeah, I love ECM and their overall aesthetic, musically and visually. They use such beautiful imagery for the packaging, and of course they produce such good music. There’s a shop up north I get to occasionally that has a great selection of new and old ECM releases, and I’m always excited to go there—as they say, ‘like a kid in a candy store’.”

But the design’s similarity was a coincidence, he says. “It was never planned for the artwork for ‘Buildings & Trees’ to be ECM style. The cover image was one of a few that I had around me in my studio when working on the album. I’m a very visual person, so quite often I use imagery to inspire the music, or at least act as a catalyst.”

Thomas took the photograph from his house on the New Zealand coast, looking out over the surrounding countryside—a rainbow, rendered in grainy black and white. “I liked the idea that the color was taken out,” he admits. That’s ironic, given the supersaturated hues of the music.

Thomas and his family—including two sons, nine and 12 years old—have lived on a hill above the sea for 13 years. He calls it an “idyllic” place, where stingrays, orca and dolphins are regularly seen passing in the water. “I have always been based here and produced music here by the sea, with the mountains in the distance. So I guess it is these views that do influence me. Of course there are many other influences, but the land and my surroundings are definitely key.”

Thomas’ creative process is deeply attuned to the spaces around him—and in fact he establishes a sort of feedback loop between place and the music. “I will often think of visual scenarios—scenes, settings, situations—that the music I am working on would create the soundtrack for. Quite often, I load the sketches onto my iPod and just listen to them in different places and spaces, testing the ideas in different environments and outlooks, both architectural and landscape.”

Andrew Thomas ‘Light on Sea (From Above the World So High)’

It’s an approach he describes as “down to earth” rather than “heavenly"—with its eyes on the ground, instead of its head in the stars. When I mention the sense of presence in the album, the music’s invocation of landscape and wide-open vistas, he says, “I’m really pleased that you get this, as when working on the album I was thinking about Bruce Springsteeen’s ‘Nebraska’ album. A stunning album from concept to completion, with its grainy black-and-white image on the cover and incredible music—more grain, more real, more down-to-earth. That Springsteen album and ECM are equal contributors in influencing me and my music.”

The music collages together many scraps from his wanderings over the years. “I had (and still have) lots of old material, from 4-track cassette recordings to early computer works, and I just started to compile and cut-and-paste some of this material together. Plus a lot of playing piano, synthesizers, etc.” There are even trace elements of flute—which Thomas used to play in chamber ensembles—although, fortunately for the flautophobes among us, it’s blurred beyond recognition.

Andrew Thomas ‘Hazer’

His process is organic and down to earth; the album came together over a long period of time, pieced together from old recordings and new compositions.

“Most of this material was old sketches and ideas, and some field recordings on a cassette dictaphone. I produce the strings myself. All the music is made played by me apart from the guitar playing. As part of the process I will play some passages of music on the synth, piano, etc., and then I may sample my own music, re-record it through the old computer or onto cassette, and then cut and paste and compose with these fragments. So it may sound like the work is made up of sampled material, and it is, but the material is all of my own music. I have never sampled anyone else’s music.”

There’s a remarkable sense of stillness to the results—and despite its blurred edges, a limpid clarity, as well, evocative of the hours just before dawn in the springtime. “In fact, I tend to get up really early to work on the music,” says Thomas. “The studio is not that extensive, but I really like it—it’s small and set underneath the house, with a window on one end. The view out the window is exactly what is on the cover of my album ‘Fearsome Jewel’.”

The music’s organic quality, edges crumbling like broken leaves, derives in no small part from Thomas’ production methods. They’re not lo-fi, exactly, but they’re also unconcerned with trends in software and technology.

“I have, and use, a lot of old gear,” says Thomas. “I have a bunch of keyboards, a piano, and also tape recorders. Yes, I do work with a laptop—is that a dirty word now?—and also an old PowerMac computer which struggles to record accurately, hence a lot of my material has glitches in it. This is not perfectly placed, plug-in glitch fashion FX, but real and random, and produced by the computer, not me. I work on old Cubase software and have never used a ‘plug-in’ in my life, I wouldn’t even know how to—crazy, I know. In fact, I am now looking at getting some new gear. It will be interesting to see where it all goes next—I can’t wait.”

Andrew Thomas ‘One Thousand Pinholes in a Black Paper’

Like the best ambient music, it’s easy to let ‘Between Buildings & Trees’ dissolve into the background while you’re listening to it; like Eno’s ‘Music for Airports’, it blends into the environment. Appropriately, Thomas isn’t greatly concerned with how listeners approach his music. “If they are listening, then wow, that’s great. Perhaps with this album if they listened with headphones, then I know that they’d be getting that extra detail and subtlety that lies within it.”

Given that Thomas’ music over the years has never risen above a quiet murmur—his second album, after all, was titled ’Hushhh‘—I can’t resist asking if the composer ever indulges a desire for high volume. “I definitely listen to loud music,” he affirms. “Love the stuff. In fact I’m thinking of possibly putting a noisy track on this ambient compilation that I’m curating for the Agriculture called ‘Duality’. I’m doing the mix for one of the CDs, and Brock Van Wey is doing the other.” So there you have it: Thomas may actually be about to turn it up to 11. Until then, listen to ‘Between Buildings & Trees’, and turn it up as loud as you want: its sense of calm only gets more profound, just like a New Zealand mountain vista enlarged to life size, or beyond.

Andrew Thomas ‘Between Buildings & Trees’

Various, Kompakt’s ‘Pop Ambient 2010’

• (3) Comments
• (2563) Views
• Get Andrew Thomas on Beatport