The music I create for A Spot on the Hill — piano, violin, keyboards, guitar — is limited by my own abilities, which revolve primarily around writing music, playing it and recording it. It skirts at the edges of ambient and shares some of its contemplative sensibilities — compositional ambient might be a fair term for it — but it stops well short of the full range of sound manipulation found in the wider world of ambient and electronic music.

Nonetheless, I believe there are elements of my music — repetition and drone among them — that lend themselves to such genres. This album is about expanding upon those elements and exploring those genres through collaboration. It’s about translating the music of A Spot on the Hill into new musical languages.

Each artist on Translations began with previously released Spot on the Hill pieces and used those works as the starting point for their own compositions. Ranging from ambient to electronic postrock, the resulting sound worlds stand on their own as unique compositions, offering new insights into the source material even as they demonstrate the distinct vision of each of the artists who has interpreted, added to and ultimately re-imagined the music of A Spot on the Hill.

I am deeply thankful to Oxford Ambient Collective, The Treasury Dept. and Pete Swinton for taking part in this project.

Source material

“Harmonic Ratios” (“A Need That Runs Too Deep,” from the album A Need That Runs Too Deep); “Detached Weekend” (“Isolation Sunday,” from the album The Space Between); “Take Me With You” (“Coffee, Birdsong and You,” from the album A Need That Runs Too Deep); “Fourth-Floor Walk-Up” (“Fourth-Floor Drone,” from the album The Tenth Wave); “Lonely Beacon” ("This Vast Expanse," from the album The Space Between); “New Moon” (“Go Look at the Moon,” from the album A Need That Runs Too Deep); “After the Carnival” (“64 Seconds in F minor,” from the album The Space Between)