Azure

Polypores

June 26, 2020

Electronic / Ambient / New Age

Originally released (and sold out) via Castles in Space, Azure comes in a deluxe azure blue vinyl pressing in a full gloss varnished sleeve and foldback tabs. The album creates a luxurious contemporary new age soundscape invoking the Californian New Age cassette boom of the late 70's and early 80's. The LP includes a beautiful art print designed by the sleeve designer, Nick Taylor. French comic book legend Moebius was an inspiration for Nick in parallel with his immersion in the irresistible cosmic ocean flow of the music. The album's energy center is said to open access to parallel universes and lives; it gives access to the realm of modular synthesis in Preston, Lancashire and the sphere of potentialities in the making. Stephen explains the genesis of Azure: “As with a lot of my music, the original inspiration from Azure started out with the music itself, rather than an initial concept. That is, it came through playing. I noticed that a lot of what I was writing seemed to lend itself to aquatic imagery. It was flowing, fluid, bubbling. The album was written late 2019, when it seemed to be perpetually raining, so that might have been a factor. I was also listening to a lot of new-age music at the time. Whilst I didn’t purposely set out to do a "new-age" album as such, I think a lot of that crept in there - but with it's own Polypores-esque twist. Rather than working in a specific genre, I much prefer to take elements and signifiers from a genre, and warp them into my own vision. "Once I'd decided to go down this route the writing became more focussed, and I was also able to immerse myself in various books, films, and documentaries related to the ocean, particularly the mythology and lore surrounding it. I imagined this to be the music that the sunken stone heads from Easter Island would have on their record players. A relaxation tape for dolphins. "The album was created with a modular synthesizer, which was still fairly new to me at the time. It was a fairly quick process, as I tend to record live rather than overdubbing/multi-tracking. I find this way of writing more immediate, it gives me a more direct link to my creativity, without too much thought or analysis getting in the way. I used a lot of New-Age type sounds, and one of the tracks uses a Gamelan scale. I made heavy use of granular synthesis on the human voice, to create the choir sounds. I think I did subconsciously want to create something similar to (previous LP) Flora. Not sonically (as it's a very different sound palette) but more the idea of it being an exaggerated, almost fantastical response to an environment. So whilst Flora takes place in the forest, Azure takes place in the ocean, but both focus on the fantasy elements, as opposed to the mundane or harsh reality. I wasn't going to do an album about overfishing or something. It's a form of escapism I suppose. "Some interesting facts about the album are: - One of the tracks has a short sample from the soundtrack to a well known 1990s point-and-click adventure game, set deep in the Caribbean. - I was listening to Rime Of The Ancient Mariner by Iron Maiden a lot around the time of writing.”