Earthworks Compleat by Coppice Halifax

2025 EDITOR'S NOTES:

It has now been a full decade since I released the two-volume "Earthworks" album, in September and October of the 2015 year. At the time, the albums felt like a notable high point in the Halifaxian landscape, which were very much a post-"Verdant Acre" work, although looking back now, with a different perspective, they feel utterly alien and distant, even a little incomprehensible to me. 2015 was the last full year of my life I would spend in South Carolina, and by the time these albums were published, although I did not yet know it, I would be relocated to Ohio less than twelve months later. When I left the deep south, I was so content with my decision, determined to never look back, ready to leave the Green Hell once and for always, so reappraising work like this, which to me feels so completely Carolinian in its dense humidity and overgrown process, feels more like rediscovering a past life, and in many ways, it really is. Before moving to Ohio, the way Coppice Halifax albums were recorded was so totally different - machines and cables sprawled all over the carpet of a stiflingly hot loft studio, the lights off, everything illuminated only by what could come through the two windows and emanate from the machines themselves - and after relocating and really having a tabula rasa to create a newer and more well-organized studio space with all of this hardware, the entire process changed, and slowly gave way to my current working methods with modular systems. And from this vantage point, now, I look back at "Earthworks" and feel like I am standing in field of stone ruins, wondering what structure once stood and whose hands built it, unambiguously certain that it could not have been me.

ORIGINAL 2015 COPY:

After being invited to the 2015 edition of Cold Fiction's ongoing Futur[e]cho, I began a session with a few drum machines, a heap of FX boxes and a two-minute long reel-to-reel tape loop of a calmer horn refrain from Smetana's classic "Mà Vlast (My Homeland)". In short, a similar setup as the Verdant Acre excursions, though much different by the time I finished.

In my usual fashion of aural degradation and textural processing, I treated the tape loop heavily with all sorts of eroding and elongating, however no matter what I applied to the loop, the end result would sound beautiful. This became a challenge - overdoing the compression, smearing flange and phasing and detuned chorus everywhere, almost acting recklessly, abusing the tape and testing the strength of the foundation Smetana established in 1879. No matter what I tried, the music defiantly shined that much brighter, resilient beneath the analog loss, poignantly echoing across time the stately horns of the past.

Once I realized this fact, the sessions settled into a calm relationship of understanding and love. A soft conversation with an old friend. My choice of the name for the session, before even starting it - Redoubt - along with the source of my tape loop, came into focus as a subconscious celebration of contentment at home. I peppered the tracks with field recordings of my daughter playing with my wife and I in our verdant backyard. I imagined the redoubts in my mind not as fortresses built for military defense, but as safe havens, well worn from warm sun and embracing winds, built to stand up to the ravages of time and gravity by craftsmen long since forgotten.

Analog Botany, since 2005.12.08. Impressionist techno and bedroom fantasist electronics. Compost instead of composition.

I also release music as Milieu: milieumusic.bandcamp.com

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