Flight665 by Cloudland Blue Quartet

The Cloudland Blue Quartet album pencilled in to be released in June 2022 was the latest in the CBQ "classical" series, which was to be based on the music of Richard Wagner.

Some initial work on that project has already been released, on the collection "Twentytwentyone", also available on Bandcamp, but there was still much to do.

However, as I was preparing to re-start work on the "Wagner" project, I happened to be listening to a CD chosen at random from the collection, and heard just a couple of seconds of rhythm, buried in an otherwise outlandish piece written in 1969 by the American avant-garde composer, Burr Van Norstrand.

I had the idea to create something out of those few seconds and so, this new LP came about from that chance event.

I looped the found rhythm from a few seconds to a length of around six minutes and featured it twice in the proposed piece, in the middle and at the end.

Around those, I built up new soundscapes created from combining various versions of guitarscapes taken from my "Disquietmusik" series, treating them to amend, variously, pitch, tempos, keys and direction.

I then looked to top and tail the new piece with field recordings.

Looking for items that were around a minute or so long, I found two chance recordings of flight attendants.

The combination of the soundscapes and the flight attendants led to the title "The Crucifixion Flight Façade".

On listening closely to the first flight attendant, she mentioned that the flight was No 665, from Seattle Tacoma Airport to Portland Oregon.

I looked on the map and imagined the route this short flight would take, noting the names of places over which it might fly, and those became the titles of the five parts of the piece.

Then, I decided to create a second piece, in which the flight attendants and rhythm tracks maintained their positions but the soundscapes were completely different - in much the same way as there are things on every single flight from a particular destination to another which are exactly the same, while other things on the flight (such as the crew, passengers and weather encountered) will change.

On completion of "The Margin Between Hope", five more place names were chosen and so each of the two "flights" moves southwards from Seattle to Portland.

The cover is a treated and upside down photograph of the view from the window of the room in which I work, taken a few days before the ideas above took shape.

Is that too much information as to how this record came about? Perhaps...

But, for now, sit back, relax and enjoy the flight(s)

P.S. "Wagner" remains in the pipeline.

P.P.S. If you ever listen to this while actually on a flight from Seattle to Portland, please do let me know! Maybe one day I'll make that flight myself...

A quartet in name only, initially influenced by Fripp & Eno's "No Pussyfooting" and The Velvet Underground's debut, songwriter & soundscaper David Reilly started musicking in 1977 by creating drones using sellotape on the keys of his dad's Bontempi Organ. The subsequent junk shop purchases of an electric guitar & fuzzbox and the acquisition of an old Beatles songbook, led him into songwriting...

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