WILL: The Flat and Paper Sky

Will has taken a break from staring into the distance and scribbling fragments of songs on the back of receipts to talk a little about the album that we are currently recording.

How long is the album going to take to make?

Our new album will be recorded throughout January, mixed and mastered throughout February and March, and will finally be available in September. Because that feels a long way off, we’ll be using this blog to post some ideas about the thinking that’s gone into the album – the lyrics, the music, the recording styles – as well posting some clips of the recording process and some live videos of new songs. If there’s anything particular you’re interested in knowing about, please get in touch and we’ll try and write a blog about it. For now, the first topic will be the album name – The Flat and Paper Sky, and the themes of the album.

Where does the name come from and what is the album about?

‘The Flat and Paper Sky’ comes from an Edith Sitwell poem called “Clowns’ Houses”:

“Beneath the flat and paper sky
The sun, a demon’s eye,
Glowed through the air, that mask of glass;
All wand’ring sounds that pass

Seemed out of tune, as if the light
Were fiddle-strings pulled tight.”

The poem appears in an extended sequence of poems called Facade which was written in the 1920s and set to music by William Walton to general confusion and critical condemnation.  Click here for info. Facade is a work of poetry that rejects literal interpretations, instead expressing its beauty, anger, humour, and insight through the abstract juxtaposition of images and the sounds and rhythms of the words themselves.

The themes negotiated in the poem – writing and memory; the influence of the past on the preset; the power of lust; the corruption of society – are all themes that find their way onto our album. The character ‘Erotis‘, the title of one of the tracks on our album, comes from another poem in Facade called ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’:

“Thetis wrote a treatise noting wheat is sliver like the

         sea; the lovely cheat is sweet as foam; Erotis

         notices that she

                                        Will
                                        Steal
                                        The
Wheat-king’s luggage, like Babel
Before the League of Nations grew”

It doesn’t really matter what this means – just reading the poem aloud is interesting; the way the poem is physically crafted helps a reader negotiate and perform the words.

We want our album to be a bit like this: we don’t want everything to be clear on the first listen, but that people will be intrigued enough to come back for a second, third, fourth listen and keep finding new sounds, new lyrics, and new meanings that excite and entertain them.

Our next post over the weekend will be about the different sounds and genres we’ve been inspired by in writing the album.

Cheers.

Will

 

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