Help Alistair record his first solo album

Hello friends and family!

 

Two years ago I started exploring the idea of making my own music. Generally, us classical performers aren't encouraged to do this - according to tradition, composers put notes on a page, and we interpret them.

Despite this, I've always been curious to see what I would come up with were I faced with the challenge of putting together something of my own so I decided to give it a go.

 

Me being the fairly cautious person that I am however, I decided not to go 'all in' on my first attempt but rather, came up with a plan to collaborate with composers who might be open to the idea of helping me out a bit by showing me how they work through collaboration.

 

After some thinking I managed to put together a small group of composers with whom I'd worked with in some form or another from my years studying up until more recently. I decided I wanted to draw on my own musical experiences performing lots of different kinds of music so chose composers who each have their own unique combination of musical influences. I wanted my project to take influences from western classical, modular synth, electronic dance music, ambient and many more.

 

To me it seemed most logical to make the music for cello and electronics. Apart from the fact that I love a lot of electronic music, I'm fascinated by the foundations that contemporary music and electronic music share. From composers like Ligetti and Xenakis who used their experiences with early experimental electronic music to inform their acoustic works, to more recent musicians like Aphex Twin and Thom Yorke who list many mid-twentieth century composers as influences, there’s a shared foundation that has seeped into so much music that we listen to today.

 

The idea would be that I would collaborate with each of the composers on the creation of a new work and then at the end of the process, I would make something of my own. How this collaboration played out was different for each composer. In some cases it meant ping-ponging improvisations via email and then restructuring these into a finished piece, in others, it meant them throwing ideas at me and me figuring out ways to make them possible on the cello and within Ableton (the software I was using).

 

As much as possible, I wanted the music to have an element of live performance about them. Rather than simply creating electronic backing tracks and playing along, I wanted to treat the electronics and live cello as equals and tried to incorporate elements of randomness and variation so that each performance would be slightly different.

 

In the end, I came up with a set of about 50 mins of music and I was all set to premier it when Covid struck. No performances allowed and no way of sharing these pieces with audiences.

 

Since then, these pieces have been stuck in a kind of holding phase. I, along with the composers put a lot of work into making these pieces and want to share them. With that in mind, I decided to record the full set and release it as an album. In order to do this, I’ve enlisted the help of Frerik De Jong who is an Amsterdam based recording engineer and with whom I’ve worked with on recordings with the Cello Octet over the past years. Together, we came up with a method of recording these unique pieces that does justice to the premise of the music. In short, we’ve organised a church in Zeist, where we’ll position a large speaker opposite me as I perform. Rather than recording things separately with many edits, and tying the electronics and live cello together in post-production, the bulk of the music will be recorded in one go. In this way, we hope to give the album a more organic, live feeling while also treating the electronics as a ‘musician’ performing with me in the space.

 

Obviously this all costs money which is why I’m reaching out to you right now. In order to cover all the costs associated with equipment rental, church hire, recording/post-production, pressing of CDs and promotional material, I’ve put together a budget of €7000.

 

At this point, I’ve applied for a small grant and have received €1000 towards the total. In addition to this, I am of course glad to chip in so am putting €3000 of my own money to make this possible. That leaves €3000 that I’m asking for help with. If you could contribute anything, I would be extremely grateful.

 

This is a labour of love and curiosity, and is not intended to launch my career as a pseudo solo electronic cello-playing musician! It’s a strange mix of music that certainly won’t appeal to all but I’m hoping you’ll see the value in supporting my weird little project.

 

UPDATE: My extremely talented Mum, who is providing the album art, has very generously agreed to donate 10 mini artworks based on the album cover for all donations over €200!! 

About the collaborators

 

Morris Kliphuis is a hornist, improviser and composer from The Netherlands. In addition to creating music for both conventional classical and jazz ensembles, Morris also works with electronics and synthesisers to create music that explores the boundaries of style and genre.

 

Molly Joyce’s music has been described as “serene power” (New York Times), written to “superb effect” (The Wire), and “impassioned” (The Washington Post). Her work is concerned with disability as a creative source and her unique musical style draws on several different musical influences including contemporary music and electronic dance music.

 

Qasim Naqvi is a drummer and founding member of the group Dawn of Midi. Outside of his role in D.O.M., Qasim works on a variety of projects from electronic music, to composing for orchestras, chamber groups, dance and film. His concert music has been performed/commissioned by The BBC Concert Orchestra, Jennifer Koh, The London Contemporary Orchestra, Stargaze, Bang on a Can All-Stars and Crash Ensemble amongst others.

 

Aart Strootman is a guitarist and composer who creates and performs music that straddles different musical genres. In addition to performing as soloist with several leading orchestras, he also performs and composes music that blends minimal and improvised music in his group ‘duo Strootman/Stadhouders’, as well as minimal-chamber-metal with TEMPKO.