Patrick Farmer, Sarah Hughes, Daniel Jones
The Cat from Cat Hill

Loris
Patrick Farmer   natural objects, e-bow snare, tapes, wood
Sarah Hughes   chorded zither, piano, e-bow
Daniel Jones   turntable, e-bow, piezo discs, electronics

1.  A heron and a terrapin                18:17
2.  Sophie                                         15:21
3.  Newts under concrete                 11:14

Recorded at the University of Middlesex, 2009

Interview with Patrick Farmer

First of all when and how did you get into experimental music?

For me all paths lead back to Tom Waits; he's just one of those intriguing figures you gravitate towards. Waits obviously plays with a revolving cast of wonderful musicians, and for me the most significant of said musicians would be Gino Robair. Gino's responsible for a large part of my early 'percussive' development through his album 'Singular Pleasures'. From there on I remember John Zorn being quite a major figure as I was starting to investigate experimental music, and then of course Richard Pinnell with his warmly received and copious recommendations. I'll still happily listen to Waits and Robair, but I seem to have lost whatever drew me towards Zorn.

 

I love the disc apis mellifera'that you released on Kostis Kilymis's Organised Music from Thessaloniki label. You use recordings of bees that you gently and beautifully transform in various ways. It's very effectively achieved, but is a very simple, ecologically minimal idea. Is there an ecological aspect to your approach to music?

I've slowly come to the realisation that everything I do resides under a biophilic roof. I very much dislike the attitude that some people maintain as to artists being above any degree of responsibility except to their own art, that they are above picking up after themselves and can live within an utterly selfish manner because of the very fact that they are artists. It's all commonsense really, and is not, of course, solely applicable to artists; it applies to anyone who is in a position to be able to consider things such as this. Listening, looking, using any of the senses whether indoors or out, to me, is a series of constantly humbling experiences, a never-ending plateau of significance that instills in one a wonderful sense of how insignificant we really are, and a realisation of the joy and significance that can arise from such perceived insignificance. I've asked myself time and time again as to whether there is any ecological purpose within what I do and I've never really come up with anything that is any way satisfactory, and I think that is one of the main reasons why I keep working. I can't see myself ever coming up with an answer.

Since apis mellifera was released I've often had the good fortune to observe and record honeybees, and after a few recording trips I found myself presented with quite a lot of diverse sound material. I did think about perhaps letting my own ways of hearing the world come into play again and editing the material down, chopping it up, etc.  But after a lot of daydreaming I decided to just leave the material as it was, chop off a little at the beginning and at the end and try and leave my interference to a minimum. What I was left with were about eight excerpts of sound that I think represent what can be heard in a hive much more honestly than any piece that I could have edited or processed myself. The range of sounds these insects create is really quite staggering, which leads me to a very large factor in my reasons for recording micro environments such as these, pure intrigue, a curiosity borne out of constant questioning and a respect for the world around us, especially the world we can not see or hear. I decided to put the recordings up on compost and height as the ethic of the site seemed in keeping with my recording intentions.

 

Your activities as a musician seem to cover a wide range, from field recording to percussion through electronics to the use of found objects and unconventional instruments. Is this diversity something you consciously choose, or does it just happen?

The degree of similarity within varying approaches, techniques and so forth, the environments that dictate most of what I record or collect, to whatever surface I may choose to utilise with whatever series of objects, I believe to be all intrinsically linked. During my degree I realised how similar many of the drones that I try to create with various drum heads are to a lot of the field recordings that I go out 'searching' for, and also the techniques utilised in engaging them. I like to spend a lot of time walking and thinking about the dense unification between the processes of finding materials for preparation, how my field recordings inform my playing, and how the walks inform what objects I use. It's all so hypersensitive. When you're out location-scouting you are given the chance to get to know an area, to survey it intimately, and the particular desire or desires you approach a soundscape with can shape your evaluation of it. Viewing common elements of life, such as a stretch of fencing or honeybees, in this way imbibes you with an altered perspective. Walking throughout the day to find a particular area where the fence’s sonority matches that of the wind power can encompass you entirely. Such prolonged periods of observation and quiet inevitably create many questions and lend themselves to much confusion, a great deal of which appears in my work, but it is a confusion I am happy to accommodate.

 

Many contemporary music fans of my generation have gone through years of weighing up the pros and cons of improvisation versus composed music. I get the impression that for you there is no 'versus' about it; you seem happy and refreshingly open to working in improvised contexts and to perform scored pieces. Do you have preferences either way? Is it an issue for you at all?

I have much more experience working in improvised contexts than I do with scored pieces, but I definitely don't have a preference as that depicts some sort of hierarchy. Let’s say that I lean towards a rhizomic train of thought, a kind of fugue whereby these varying processes are all indubitably connected and branch off as often as they return, the varying boughs bringing and taking with them various new experiences trying to recapture the naïve amazement of initial observation, and the joy that new sounds can bring. Intermingled within improvised and composed musics I also find a constant source of inspiration in literature. In recent times there has been no larger influence on me than the writings of Philippe Jaccottet, Francis Ponge, Italo Calvino, Andrei Platonov, Emile Zola, etc.

 

Are there any musicians or composers who you feel have particularly shaped your approach to music?

I feel that pretty much every musician I've had the good fortune to play with has altered me in some way or another. I've been so lucky to play with people like Ryan Jewell, Jez riley French, Angharad Davies, Matt Milton, Dominic Lash, etc etc, and knowing people like Lee Patterson, Jeph Jerman, Benedict Drew, Seymour Wright, David Lacey, Michael Pisaro, Mark Wastell, I'm just some kind of quasi constant amorphous existent that has simply imbibed all these joyous occurrences. Most of the people I have met through such music are very warm, friendly and positive, microcosms of the music itself.

 

Tell us about Loris, and how the recording session that became 'The Cat from Cat Hill' came about?

Originally I'd arranged with Dan Jones to record him solo at the university where I was studying at the time, as he is woefully under-recorded for someone of such genuine ability. Then we also arranged to record a few duo sets. I was talking to Sarah the night before the recording, saying how much I dislike having to record whilst playing and monitoring everything at the same time, so she offered to come down and help out. Events transpired and she, thankfully, brought her zither down to the studio. I can't really imagine the recording without her presence; a lot of the soundworlds that Dan and I share are very similar, and having Sarah there just threw our playing out the door and enabled us to treat the situation with a lot more clarity and animation.

The title is a little nostalgic, as the campus we recorded in is called Cat Hill, and for the last two years in university a cat was adopted by the university, a cat of ample proportions that would happily sit on top of the bookshelves in the library and once, I believe, sat on Sarah's lap for about an hour.

 

You arrived in London with a whirlwind of energy and set up or got involved very quickly in lots of projects. What did you make of the London scene, and is it going to be hard being away from the metropolis where, for better or worse, the vast majority of experimental musicians in the UK live and work?

None of it was conscious at first, it just all seemed to happen. I can't remember my first gig at Cafe Oto, which was pretty much where I played all of my London shows. I was touring a lot more then than I am now and had made a lot of good friends through putting on shows in Nottingham, and when I moved down obviously they were all playing in and around London at some point or another, so things just really took off from there. I don't miss London, I love being in the country. I obviously miss the people there, but it's just another way of looking at the same picture.

 

This does feel like an exciting time in contemporary music, with new figures emerging and new connections being made between different 'schools' or groups of musicians and composers. You yourself are shortly going to perform works by two of the Wandelweiser group of composers (Michael Pisaro and Manfred Werder) at a concert in Bristol with the musicians from Loris plus Matt Davies and David Thomas. Is this at least one of the directions that you see yourself moving in?

Reading over Manfred and Michael's text-based scores is a wonderful string of experiences in itself, regardless of realising them in the public domain, and I think a lot of it comes down to the period before the recording or the performance itself. A dominant aspect of field recording is the location scouting, the searching, standing still, revisiting a location time and time again with varying intent, the thoughts that present themselves to you and the thoughts you present yourself to, and I think a lot of what appeals to me about scores by people like Manfred and Michael is just that: the time spent beforehand, the consideration and the varying moments spent in their presence.

 

As well as making music you (together with Sarah Hughes) run the remarkable Compost and Height label and website (http://compostandheight.blogspot.com/). You seem to have a commendably open policy in terms of accepting material on the website from a wide variety of musicians. Do you seek out submissions, or simply take things that are sent to you? Do you have clear criteria for taking material, and are there things that fall within the general area of experimental music that you wouldn't put on the website?

Both Sarah and I used to put on shows, in Sheffield and in Nottingham, and when we moved to London we wanted to carry on doing something but we didn’t really want to carry on promoting, so we came up with the idea for the label. It developed a lot quicker than we thought. I remember us looking through Logic of Sense by Deleuze and trying to come up with a name for the label, developing some kind of environmentally aware manifesto that we could work from, and then simply asking a few people whom we both admired to send us some of their work. From then on the response has been really overwhelming. So many people have helped us get the label off the ground, and so many people continue to introduce themselves to us through their wonderful work. We haven't really sought out a submission for a while now, although one thing we would love to do, and have wanted to do since the label’s conception, is be host to more writing!

As in keeping with the ethos of the label, the content of the writing would be very open, but we are certainly after a more, shall we say, conscientious, consilient, approach to a work… Having said all that, the best thing for us about the label has been getting to know people like Ben Owen and Adam Sonderberg through their submissions, and then the friendships that develop from that point. Friendships that probably wouldn’t have existed if it were not for the label.  That's really a wonderful thing.

Reviews

“The slow  loris, of course, is a notably sluggish primate hailing from southeast Asia.  Loris, here, is Patrick Farmer (natural objects, e-bow snare, tapes, wood), Sarah Hughes (chorded zither, piano, e-bow) and Daniel Jones (turntable, e-bow, piezo discs, electronics) and if they move slow (they don't really) they're thinking fast, pace Wolff, and the results are gorgeous.  Enormous range of sounds, very open feel.  How to quantify except to say that the choices made, subtle to brutal (and there's a surprising amount of fierceness in play here) seem utterly apt.  The various flutterings and spare piano that begin the second cut, "Sophie", for example; the way the e-bow (?) intersects them.  Each piece unfurls at its own pace, each telling a lovely, sometimes harsh story. Beautiful work, highly recommended.”                                                                                                         
Brian Olewnick, Just Outside

“Despite that feline title, and as any skoolboy noes, lorises are slow-moving nocturnal primates that inhabit dense vegetation in South Asia.  And Loris - Patrick Farmer, Sarah Hughes and Daniel Jones - improvise sounds that inch forwards so gradually, almost reluctantly in fact, that your brain can’t properly compute the totality of their creeping sonic forestation at any given moment.  These improvisations, to borrow Evan Parker’s famous catchphrase, are instinctively laminal as sustained tones from Hughes’s zither (the only element that vaguely harks back to ‘music’) dovetail against crackling feedback and the more feral terrain of Framer’s crunched twigs and arrythmic earth.  Shifts of texture occur sporadically and without seismic structural earthquakes; the music just seems to know, and goes there.”                                                                                                         - Philip Clark, The Wire

"I’m not sure if a glass of bourbon is the best way to relax after a run. But I’ll give it a shot. The simplicity of sitting on a chair… the company to slow burn and astringency of charred oak. The ice is melting delicately, and it’s muggy as hell outside right now. I haven’t been hearing as many roman candles and Black Cats as I had hoped this time of year. Madison is too fucking polite sometimes, locked up in a fixed gear land of hippie fuzz tone and good vibrations, mang. Where’s the cordite blooms, the rivers of frat boy blood, the roving bands of date rape thugs in Sponge Bob Square Pants costumes? Oh, yeah, they’re back home with ma and pa, drinking Bud lite, and reading the back of Clean and Clear bottles. And instead I’m listening to Loris’s “The Cat from Cat Hill,” another disc from the UK based Another Timbre records… and it’s polite too, but in a good way, like that ingratiating new friend that never out stays his welcome and never drinks all of your beer but still tells good jokes anyway… even if this friend at first sounds like carpenter ants eating through raw bone, pincers flashing in the dark. Loris has been a highlight for me lately, sitting uneasily amongst less subtle recordings by bands with pentagrams featured in their logos. Loris is made up of Patrick Farmer, Sarah Hughes and Daniel Jones on assorted electronic and acoustic instruments too lengthy to list in polite company, but here’s some anyway: zither, piano, natural objects, turntable, and tapes. I don’t know any of them but they seem like cool people (actually I have no idea), and they create some very interesting music. Sustained tones spring up after the initial thorax heave of the first track, and glitches trip up then disappear, while a ringing is heard then cut off unceremoniously. God, it reminds me of why I started to get into this electro acoustic junk in the first place – that sublime encounter of disparate elements, of sounds you can practically touch in the dark like walking through great walls of smoke or fog, seeing bats wheel drunkenly in the air so daringly close to your head. It’s warmer than most EAI, thoroughly book smart on the fundamentals of the genre it seems. . . it’s not as austere as Filament, not as noisy as Cremaster, not drearily emotive as Schnee, but I can sense an acknowledgment of all of those things here, if not directly than somehow subliminally. I love how the second track opens with those piano notes, completely unexpected after the electronic pinch of the first track. It lends a certain nostalgic thrust to thing, even as the locked grooves (Jones here?) appear behind the notes, and that moment becomes fleeting, and sinks away to an extended tone, only for the piano to reassert itself once again, this time more abstracted, and less full of gravitas. Lovely really. I can’t think of a better word for it, achingly lovely. There’s this great juxtaposition of sounds here that the best of this music has, the sliding up of common but hard to place sounds next to one another, clicks and burrs, low volume field recordings of trains, or engine rattle or sizzling eggs (who the fuck knows). Nothing is overt and thus it doesn’t make you play the guess what sound that is game – what the hell was that? A mumbled half curse? A masticating answering machine? A feed backing tickle me Elmo? Nah, don’t bother, it’s for the birds. At this point the language of this style has been established, and the shock of sine tones, noisy rumbles and the assorted electronic dark alley dealings has worn off (for me at least, can’t speak for anyone else, I guess). And what’s left here is simply the music, how these sounds stand up as part of a composition (instant or not)… the obscure has become the recognized pallet, and you have to be able to actually use those colors well, blend and shade and create a picture whether it be Rothko or Rembrandt or . The acoustic instruments used here by Sarah Hughes are a boon, as they lend a solid grip to the music, a balancing weight that without it it might simply disappear into the 21st century art-fuck music (thanks Kennan) – music created as intellectual process rather than tired ol’ feelings. And I like feelings. If I want truth and commentary on audience expectation I’ll search youtube for Nick Nolte off his shit.

The more I listen to this the more I enjoy it, which speaks volumes for Loris. And it’s not all fun and games easy listening EAI as I’ve heard the work of those Swiss guys referred to. This stuff still annoys my girl friend, and would probably riddle most of my friends with anxiety (although many of them dig AMM). But we have enough Jerry Garcia’s. Enough Wolf Parades. And Loris should be as popular, or at least as well known, because as it stands, they do what they do so well, so picturesque in a sense. No, it’s not at this point where the art makes you shudder in awe or reconfirm your own proclivities, but it could approach those areas in the future. At this point, it defies expectations, defies boring mastubatory capital A art, and becomes something actually, well, moving and purposeful to listen to, something great to drink bourbon to as the night creeps in and my cat stares at me from afar, which is quaint, considering the title. Anyway, stop spending money on lattes and buy this:.”         
Tanner Servoss, Aphidhair

“Patrick Farmer, Sarah Hughes, and Daniel Jones are young London-based improvisers who are just starting to get some visibility. As with many releases like this, a look at the instrumentation (natural objects, e bow, tapes, chorded zither, piano, turntable, piezo discs, electronics) gives no clue as to what this music might sound like, though knowing that a loris is a slow-moving tree-dwelling primate might give you an idea. Farmer, Hughes, and Jones weave together collectively improvised striations of texture and activity that gather density and form with slow deliberation. The pieces unfold from a palette of hyper-amplified vibrating surfaces, electronic hum, and resonant strings. What's striking here is how each sound, each thread of activity, is placed within the context of the whole.
The improvisations have an almost sculptural presence, offsetting engulfing low-end rumble by sputtering crinkles, luminous sinewaves, and the judicious use of string vibrations from zither and piano. Semaphores of flickering activity float across fields of resonant drone. There's an organic warmth to the sound of electro-mechanical pulses and clicks melded together with the ringing tone of a hammered piano note or the rustle of amplified objects. Across the three collectively improvised pieces, the trio purposefully parse out pace and momentum, density of sound, and dynamic arc, creating a absorbing intensity. That sense of arc is acutely evident in the final piece, "Newts Under Concrete," where coursing loops of static emerge after a lead-in of 90 seconds of inky silence. The volume gradually mounts as crackles and squawks build into a forceful, enveloping wall of sound shot through with wafting details. With The Cat from Cat Hill, Another Timbre delivers yet another gem.”                        
Michael Rosenstein, Paris Transatlantic

“This is one of those CDs that, if I just tried to describe the music literally, will sound very much like so many other CDs. There are sine-like tones, contact mic crackles, turntable hisses and scratches, extended fuzzy sections and a continual sense of brooding calm, but then that could describe a couple of dozen CDs I have mentioned here this year. What makes The Cat from Cat Hill such a pleasure for me personally though is in the subtlety of the sounds chosen. This is a difficult thing to describe in a way that makes sense to anyone but myself. Generally speaking, each musician contributes one sound at a time, which they let slip in and out of proceedings at a slow, slow pace. So Hughes will let an eBowed zither note hang in the air, as Farmer rubs dry twigs against a contact mic and Jones will later introduce a gentle feedback hum, but each of these sounds will be very carefully picked out as being the ideal fit for those around it. So we don’t just hear a musician add a whine or a series of scrapes, we hear them carefully craft them to either blend perfectly, or on occasion dramatically alter the sounds already there. This might just sound like a description of what every musician tries to do, but here there is a feeling to me of great care taken over the quality of individual sounds chosen, and of when and how they are introduced into or removed from the music. This just sounds very considered music to me.

If I am to criticise the album at all it may be just to say that there aren’t enough surprises, and that on the whole it does exactly what I expect it to, though maybe this is just the result of my familiarity with these musicians’ work. When Jones adds a tiny repeatedly chirruping electronic signal to proceedings (the result of capturing the electromagnetic output of an iPod’s hard drive I believe) I know it will run for a while as a kind of slow, primitive clicktrack. When Hughes plays a single low note on a piano and then lets it decay slowly I fully expect an identical one a few seconds later. As I say, on paper the music of Loris is somewhat predictable, but listened to carefully under the right conditions this album is very beautiful and thoroughly rewarding.

Like the group’s namesake (the name Loris comes from Hughes and Farmer’s huge love of animals, and in particular here the rennowned shy, slow loris) the music moves at a very gradual pace and slides out of your speaker into hidden corners of the room rather than leaping out and throttling you. It isn’t entirely polite though, and on occasion will make the cones of your speakers vibrate wildly, so turning the volume up high, which at times feels the right thing to do is later rewarded by a sudden lunge for the dial to bring it back down. The overall sensation though is one of a calm but invigorating massage of the eardums, a very lovingly crafted and finely detailed wander through some beautifully interconnected sounds. Yet more fine stuff from Another Timbre.”     
Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear

“Loris is Patrick Farmer playing natural objects/E bow snare/tapes/wood, Sarah Hughes on chorded zither/piano/E bow and Daniel Jones supplying turntable/E bow/piezo discs and electronics. Their music is constructed of minimal gestures that seem at times borrowed directly from nature-witness the fuzzy crackling and odd insectile sounds at the start of the first track, "A Heron and a Terrapin", which has a very natural sounding sway from quiet activity to near silence and back. The electric hums seem to enter at just the right moment, nothing is out of place, and if I tried hard I could probably identify the sound sources, but I'd rather just listen.

A single repeated piano note begins "Sophie", encased in room reverb and shape-shifting slightly, with more crackling and circular dragging-type sounds that slowly take on a metallic edge. A building hum and some feedback, rustling and the piano note again. Sounds like someone cleaning up next to an elevator or air-shaft. Until the feedback changes pitch and subtle ratcheting joins in. The piano is still there, but becoming blurrier, losing focus. The whole builds to a quiet roar which sounds like many more than three people. Reminds me a bit of AMM at times, and at others a room full of old tin toys.

"Newts Under Concrete" is quietest yet, until the electric storm starts spinning around two minutes in. A worn-out gramophone needle on the lead-out of a worn-out record, scraping the label. It gradually becomes apparent that there are a group of sounds here, as the components separate and develop individually in a unique reverse dove-tail. More feedback and some steam congeal together and one section seems an odd distorted mirroring of the previous track.

The thing I enjoy most about "The Cat From Cat Hill" is the way this music fills up my room. Even at relatively low volume levels I can stand up and actually walk around in it. Whether this is due to the nature of the sounds themselves, or the beautiful recording I know not. At just under 45 minutes playing time though, it seems all too short.”
Jeph Jerman, The Squid’s Ear