"Most of my recorded output over the past sixteen years or so has focussed on free improvisation and so I wanted a change from that. When Mark Wastell from Confront Recordings suggested I put out a solo record I had already been formulating ideas during long periods of working in pop music and from acting as an accompanist for a variety of songwriters including Little Annie, Baby Dee, Ladan Hussein (Cold Specks), Timber Timbre, Devon Sproule, Edd Donovan, and Fyfe Dangerfield.

The aim was to write a piece of popular music for solo bass clarinet, and this started to resemble a series of naive folk dances. I began writing out variations in February 2016 using a jumble of minute long sketches I already had lying around. Some of the sketches were just oblique melodies that were written between shows I had been playing in Montreal the previous year. These established the basic threads that I needed and I gave myself a set of rules about how to break things down, turning them into a series of fragmented rhythms.

A simplicity in the writing soon became exaggerated as I started to explore pinpointed phrases and staccato voicings. Smaller passages began to take shape from within by reducing melodic lines sometimes to a recurring series of just two or three notes. This is evident in the two Upnor Dances which both pivot around a recurring string of high F-naturals and B-flats. It was all a very playful and pretty random approach to composition.

The result is a combination of cyclical themes, made-up folk dances, and invented improvisations. On the most part I wrote it out in a very conventional fashion - but the score is filled with interruptions. I wanted to create windows of opportunity where I could also expand self-developed playing techniques. These moments sometimes use modular fragments and compound rhythms but otherwise the playing is allowed to open up and become quite free. They also help to throw exuberant measures of time and metre into altered states.

Improvisation allows a more tactile relationship with the instrument and I can conjure distortions in the music which I wouldn't want to contrive through extrapolated notation techniques or complexities of writing. In this sense the music is allowed to breath. There is something magical about a performance where you know it will never be heard exactly the same way twice, it places you in the moment."-Chris Cundy