Swifts at the Aqueduct

After a really, really long time, here is another piece for the ‘music of what happens’ project.

And on SoundCloud:

This piece began over a year ago with me trying to record some acoustic guitar in my shed.  I was just playing with the various settings, trying not to get caught in all the cables, place the mic in a good position and so on; doing all this a tune began to emerge.  I filed it and forgot about it.  In between times I shot some video at the end of a blistering hot day in Segovia, a beautiful city in Spain not far from Madrid.  I was there for work in June 2017 and this was the evening of my last day there and time to explore with some friends.  I was struck, like most visitors, by the stunning Roman aqueduct and, like most visitors, by the vast numbers of swifts swooping and diving through the arches and in the sky overhead. I used the slow motion setting on my phone and the slowed down calls of the swift provided an inspiration for the music which followed some months later back in the shed, to which I then added the previously recorded guitar.  David Julyan very generously took time to mix it and made it much better. I have now edited it into a short film in which nothing much happens, other than swifts make their way across two kinds of skies and through the arches of the aqueduct. The various fades and dissolves create abstract shapes in which I think I see something different each time.  It all seems to fit with the music of what happens being about those moments where nothing much happens for a little while. As with Through the Market you can listen to it on SoundCloud without the video or you can watch it with the video on Vimeo…  I hope you like it…

With thanks also to Olly Stothert for help with the compression settings.