About the project
a s y l u m p e a c e
'Music is so naturally united with us that we cannot be free from it even if we so desired' - Boethius, 'Fundamentals of Music' (in Storr, 1992)
'Music is a memory bank for finding one's way about the world' - Australian aborigine to B. Chatwin, in 'The Songlines', 1988
London-born to German and English parents both of whom had a great love of music, I grew up with classical, the musicals, big band and jazz a constant soundtrack to home life; along with the aromas of baking bread, open fires and rural mustiness.
My parents attended concerts and theater when they could afford it and generously took us children with them when they could.
My mother’s love of classical music in particular took root in me with a predilection towards the ‘pastoral’ composers including Vaughan Williams, Finzi and Elgar. Gerald Finzi remains my favourite of the pre-mid 20th century composers. My father’s jazz records, together with my own attraction towards softer, more pastoral rock sounds (mellotron-era Barclay James Harvest; TOTT- and W&W-era Genesis; early ELO; Moody Blues; Sandy Denny/Fotheringay; etc.) were influences on my developing guitar style. Hard to deny too the influences of Neil Young and Jimmy Page, whose playing styles and sounds I aspired to at that time.
This found expression in various bands – to varying degrees of seriousness and all very naive – then to solo songwriting, and periods of regular busking. Experimentation with song and compositional form became experimentation with sound. My first recorded piece in my current, settled-upon ‘voice’ ( a s y l u m p e a c e project) was built around an ‘accident’, delayed and caught on a loop. A story oft repeated by so many artists no doubt, but true nonetheless.
For me, as for many I am sure, the relation between music, landscape, and the environment in all its aspects is inextricable. The boundaries between myriad influences are permeable and transparent. The notion of music as the aforementioned ‘soundtrack to life’ is a super-cliche, but an ever appealing and true one all the same. I think it is because, as Colum McCann describes in his genius novel ‘Transatlantic’, our memories are formed, not so much from language – of names and places and things said – as from light, colour; yes, and music, along with all the other manifold triggers of the sensorium.
My memory returns me constantly and vividly to a particular locus of light, colour, sound and smell. I am in a rear sitting room of the small 19th century lodge house I lived in from ages 9 to 21: Avenue Lodge, Braxted Park Estate, Essex, England. Winter night-time. Open fire crackling and simmering; waft of a down-draught. Barclay James Harvest’s ‘Time Honoured Ghosts’ on the turntable – though could have been Denny/Fairport’s ‘Rising For The Moon’ or Moody Blues' 'To Our Childrens Childrens Children' . Lost in the music and in my gaze across a broad semi-wild garden that opened into arable fields sloping towards a horizon-wide band of woodland. All adorned in ethereal moonlit snow. Oh, and the heat in my throat from the occasional quarter bottle of whiskey I daringly and underage-edly savoured.
My search to produce sounds that are part of my personal emotional loop, and the hope that they may touch or tap into that of a listener, has led me to piece together these modest, essentially lo-fi recordings. I lay them before anyone who is so very kind-enough to listen as my rendition of landscape, environment and relationships.
With grateful thanks, Christopher Andreas
Tayeko
Tayeko (‘child of many blessings’)
‘As I silence myself I become more sensitive to the sounds around me, and I do not block them out. The songs of the birds, the rustle of the wind, children in the playground, the roar of an airplane overhead are all taken into my worship...I feel the flow of life within me from my toes right through my whole body. I think of myself like the tree planted by the ‘rivers of water’ in Psalm 1, sucking up God’s gift of life and being restored...My own name, Tayeko, means ‘child of many blessings’ and God has surely poured them upon me. My heart overflows with a desire to give him something in return. I have nothing to give but my own being, and I offer him my thoughts, words and actions of each day, and whisper ‘Please take me as I am’.’
Tayeko Yamanouchi, 1979
Compass and Sail
Compass And Sail
For S.J.
‘The stars are close and dear and I have joined the brotherhood
of the worlds. And everything‘s holy - everything, even me.’
John Steinbeck
Beyond
our lights’ extrusion,
Blind of telescopic confusion,
These ploughed august eyes and my October son
Pale beneath ceilings of fusion-encrusted seams;
Where the diamond dark,
A holy dark most fitting to talk of Cause
Confounds his autumn unquestioning heart,
Portending closing doors and closing days;
Surely now the age to ask.
And so he does. And in these gusty,
Debris days he does as he must,
His way
Is a tawny flight
Breathless leap from the occupied zone
To surcease with the once lonely scientist.
Not lonely anymore but, father, still hurting?
Father - that is me,
Wishing untangled moments were manifold,
Not, as in truth, weak, intermittent sounds
Straining to be heard through the torrent din
Of the must-be-said, must-have
And so-must-do I’ve allowed to sweep away
Bridges spanning our hearts
Both warm and worn
We voyage,
Yet I in the wake of his courage
Revive heroic Ham, weightless and hairy;
Helpless in harness yet bound to be freed from ape
And mortal instinct
Once, at the brink of discovering how rich this mine
Particles pierce desire
We rest
A while at the keel of the ship Argo.
Light years gone ignition’s ire.
Now assaulted earth dissolve, reach of space
Embrace and life-support us
After all
The growing’s done,
Bairn, your broken ground may be fruitless
And thrown down ( arrest – you must - the growing down )
Between brittle stems tied with twine and bound passion
For renascent spring
And the darker parts you dug your den within;
Digging, thinning with too lowly a mind
Your sacred and secret place to compose.
Dear, please, raise your eyes again,
Beyond the storm to near-Aurora nights
We rode the infinite curve;
Beyond our dumb-blind reaping floods
At the final call of our seasons;
Before
It all became too much down here
For you my sworn friend my soldier.
But I promised we would travel
Go next time to the Compass
and the Sail
