Subterranea by Bartholomew

I’ve always tried to make my music about things. My hope is that it gives a reason for each track to exist in the context of an album, making the record greater than the sum of its parts. I knew when I started Subterranea it was going to be about stability and the value I assign to consistency and predictability in my own life.

Stability is not something that comes naturally to me. I have always had quite a wide emotional dynamic range and a very changeable mood. During an episode of very poor mental health in my early twenties, my therapist suggested that a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder might be more appropriate than the label of depression that previous professionals had assigned to me. I scanned the NHS leaflet: emotional instability, impulsivity, unstable self-image. The resonance hit me like microphone feedback through an empty room. A tight web of friends and family held me together as I recovered, and I made the promise to myself that I would work hard to create a life that could offset the stormier side of my temperament and hopefully keep me well. The rest of my twenties weren’t especially successful in this regard: freelance theatre work isn’t the most stable of careers and the demands of London living added additional pressure. The Pandemic straddled the end of my twenties and beginning of my thirties and marked a natural punctuation. I moved to the North East, I left theatre though stayed freelance, we got a dog. I’d started in earnest to build the scaffolding around myself that I wanted.

Subterranea started life as a set of demos I sent off to Gordon (Warrington Runcorn Newtown Development Plan) after we’d played on the same bill at The Cumberland Arms in Newcastle. I’d spent the previous month reworking my live show and I was so pleased it had resonated with someone I respected so much. When he asked me to send some tracks over to him and Colin, I was over the moon. The demos largely all started life on my synth wall, bouncing sounds in and out of samplers and guitar pedals before building grooves. I’d record those ideas as audio and midi into the computer and set to work re-orchestrating themes, carving out space, always cutting back before adding. I was building on the techniques I’d developed on Moorbound, focusing on the interplay between rich acoustic sounds and electronic textures, taking generatively-composed themes and motifs and developing them on traditional instrumentation. I was trying to step further into the world of my inspirations: Hannah Peel, Tim Hecker, Bonobo.

As the album was taking shape, my life felt like it was falling apart. I lost a major client. I had a traumatising first session with a new therapist. A minor speeding offence ballooned through Kafka-esque bureaucracy into a court appearance. The buttressing I’d constructed around myself was nothing in comparison to sudden destructive forces I was being hit with. My mental health suffered. Amid this, the notion that Subterranea could be celebration of the stability I’d constructed felt hollow. I kept at it and some harsher textures crept in. Bigger contrasts, more sadness.

Now Subterranea is finished, it is still about stability, but also an acceptance that however hard I work or how strict the controls I put in place, I cannot guarantee myself the balance that I want. It’s a scary thought, but a freeing one as well.

Chris Bartholomew

Lunar Module is a new CD imprint from Castles in Space. Season One is comprised of 10 CDs.