Distance

Slater, Mark; Martin, Adam; Hallett, Maxwell

Abstract

'Distance' was made after the Nightports w/ Betamax album was already complete – we went back through the original recordings to check for parts we’d missed, stones left unturned and sounds we’d previously left alone. These tracks contain a new array of sounds and shapes from Betamax to act as a follow on to what the album started.

Nightports is based on a simple but unbreakable rule of restriction: only sounds produced by the featured musician can be used. Nothing else. These sounds can be transformed, distorted, translated, processed and reprocessed, stretched, cut, ordered and reordered without limitation.



Nightports is about amplifying the characteristics of the musician – celebrating what’s particular about them, finding sounds that nobody else can make, constructing a complex sonic weave that, however radical the transformations, still bears the watermarks of its origin.

Nightports w/ Betamax is the second in a series of albums from musician-producers Adam Martin and Mark Slater to be released on The Leaf Label. It follows 2018’s Nightports w/ Matthew Bourne, which drew its source material from a series of sessions by maverick composer Matthew Bourne, on a range of different pianos.

This time, Nightports have enlisted the formidable talents of drummer and percussionist Betamax, the beating rhythmic heart of sonic explorers The Comet Is Coming. Recorded in one day in February 2018 at Malcolm Catto’s Quatermass Sound Lab studio, Betamax traced lines of thought within of a tangled web of cables, microphones and vintage equipment. Over the following months, Martin and Slater set about decoding the recorded results of that day.

“Within the depths of the drum takes, we found hidden melodies, chords, structures and bass lines which we distilled and exaggerated to realise this album,” Slater explains. “On the one hand, this album is fully improvised in that all drum performances were spontaneous, intuitive and responsive; however, they were then subjected to editing and manipulation to arrive at a sound that is neither purely improvised
nor constructed.”

Citation

Slater, M., Martin, A., & Hallett, M. (2020). Distance. [https://nightports.bandcamp.com/album/distance]

• Digital Artefact Type: Audio
• Publication Date: Jul 3, 2020
• Deposit Date: Jul 13, 2020
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/3541211