Charlie & Bear started 2025 with a week-long residency developing their collaborative approach to songwriting and soundmaking. We are grateful for the support from Creative Scotland for this project and acknowledge this time as the privilege that it was. We will use this post both to describe our activities and to try to solidify our thoughts on a number of topics.
“What do you see?” Bear asked as we sat in the kitchen with guitars and coffee.
They were asking about songs. Trying to help understand the inside of my mind and pick out the pieces to use from the infinity of possibility.
Making art is a process of transformation. A translation of a thought from your mind into some kind of transmition into the tangable reality of “things” to then be picked up, recompiled and redefined into the unfathomable alien landscape of another conciouseness. Quite the trip.
Describing the work you make or intend to make can be challenging. Normally i might try either overly vague non-genres (“cosmological folksong” being my current choice) or technical descriptions of processes and techniques I intended to explore to try to reach the sounds I was imagining.
However, it is useful to be able to answer it internally to help solidify ideas and and focus the imagination. Particularly when collaborating with others the ability to describe your ideas is an essential step to being able to understand and subsequentially realise them.
So I tried to describe the sounds in my head and what they meant for me, building a picture for Bear to examine and decide how best to make their contribution.
We did this for each of the four songs that we were working on and then began to see how certain sections of Bears’ Mechanical Orchestra might fit certain songs. Many notes were made and much cosmic wonder spun…
#1
https://on.soundcloud.com/ircYjGJTABWtaAr97
Imagining the power and potential of infinite possibility expanding and contracting through time. Vibrations leaving ripples on the surface of an ancient swamp .
Glacial crescendos emerge from bubbling brass. Contextual sound for a sense of scale and proportion. Not harsh but powerful, deep.
#2
SONG: Sequence
SOUND: Tabletop Mechanics
a song sung chanted as one:
I grow through everything you find
Molecules and majesty beyond design
(All) I can do is keep an open mind
*Drums break through - a slowly unwinding lead in from seed to time culminating in a groove (+drone?)on the first beat of next sequence.
a bassy synth wobbling filter shadows the ripples of the brass. Heavy, electric. Goes round twice as intro to verse 2. Bass riff starts.
Pass the sound on from organic to synthetic another process transformation