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Shoures Soote

by CERFILIC

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1.

about

'The music is as melancholic as it is splendid' (Peter van Cooten - Ambienblog).

‘Pure tones laid like translucent paint strokes ... layering, hesitations, delicate, sometimes fierce, overwhelming ... ‘ (Carolyn Deby)

‘Shoures Soote’ for String Quartet and sound processing, was made in the wake of my older brother John’s unexpected death at the end of 2022. A companion piece (perhaps a ‘brother’) to my earlier piece ‘Stilled’ this album is an hour-long extract from a work of indeterminate length. Like much of my music, it’s an environment … one of my ‘weather systems’ as I like to think of them. Making it helped me to reconnect to the world as I navigated the loss of my much-loved brother … there is grief there, but it’s also an affirmation of life in the face of it.



About Shoures Soote from April 2023.

Although I’ve done a couple of small things, I am returning for the first time since my brother John died in late December to beginning work on a piece of music of my own. When my brother first died, the idea of playing an instrument, let alone making a piece of music was completely beyond me. I came to realise that making music is for me, so much an expression of being alive, that without realising it consciously, deep inside I felt that to make a sound on an instrument or to sing would be a terrible betrayal of my brother: how could I do something that expressed being alive so fully for me, when John was no longer alive?

I had an imaginary conversation with John a couple of months after he died in which ‘he’ told me: ‘You’ve taken death into your body. There is nothing wrong with death, but it’s wrong for the living to take death inside them. You have to release death from your body and learn to live again.’ I was looking out of the window as I had this conversation with John. It was a February dusk. Just as John ‘spoke’ those words, the light on the streetlamp that I had unwittingly been staring at clicked on. A half an hour later I played my cello for the first time since John died. It was only for ten minutes and I didn’t play again for a few weeks, but it was a start at living again.

Now it’s the end of April, almost four months after John died and I miss him terribly. The last text I had from him said: ‘The days are getting longer! Air punch!’ John and I both always counted the days until the return of the light and the birth of Spring. I’m taking some joy in the slow return of Spring this year, but every moment of joy is stained with the sadness that John isn’t here to experience it with me.

When I was sixteen, I started doing English A-Level, dropping it after six months to do music in a year. During those first six months we studied the General Prologue and the Pardoner’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I was studying French and German too, so being a language geek, I loved translating Chaucer’s English and loved trying to speak it out loud. I learned the opening of the Prologue off by heart and every April I find myself remembering those lines:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour …

(Something like:
When April, with its sweet showers
Has pierced the drought of March to the root,
And bathed every vein in such powerful liquor
From which virtue the flower is born …)


This April has been quite wintry a lot of the time, although the Spring has definitely been showing its face. I am beginning to feel more alive again, but my brother is still dead.

I started off the compositional process by reading through the Chaucer Prologue to trigger me to generate longer and shorter notes on several groupings of string quartet. I’m using each of these groupings to make what I call ‘seeds’ that I then subject to sound treatment and time stretching and compacting.

I used the word ‘seed’ for these bits of material I make, because everything grows out of them, but it’s appropriate too, because of the way I have to work with them: It’s a process of tending – waiting - observing what the material seems to suggest for itself.

When I started on Shoures Soote I felt I needed to be involved in making music in a way that brought me some comfort. To manage to make anything was enough. The idea of making anything that was aiming to be ‘original’ in some way was beyond me at that moment and so I returned to the principles of a piece I’d made in 2008 Stilled, in a way it’s kind of a Stilled Mark Two. Like Stilled it’s a piece that is of indeterminate duration and can run for many hours as the many different layers of sound (about 120 at the time of writing) I’ve made from the ‘seeds’ are combined in different ways.

The weather has been alternating between rain, wintry cold and Spring sunshine. I’m the same … the sense of loss and pain coming in and out of focus … my ability to do things other than just coping with living in the wake of the loss of John waxing and waning. Right now, it’s sunny and warm after a cold afternoon. Right now, I’m able to be with this music making.

The ‘seeds’ that have arisen from the process of translating Chaucer’s words into musical notes feel to me like the remnants of something beautiful that was broken … things that must have made sense in their context, but now feel like fragments of memory hanging in the air without the world that gave them meaning. I’m trying to allow a small new world to emerge where these fragments and memories can make a new kind of sense.

April 2023

credits

released January 26, 2024

Jamie Michael McCarthy - Violin, Viola, Cello and Sound Processing.

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CERFILIC London, UK

Ambient sounds with the slow and sudden changes of weather systems. Former member of Canadian Band ‘The Hidden Cameras’, London-based musician Jamie Michael McCarthy studied and performed with the composer Gavin Bryars. He makes music under the name Cerfilic: expansive, meditative atmospheres mixing strings with other instruments and environmental sounds and sound processing .

jamiemccarthy.net
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