‘Dancers’ from the album Interspaces (2022). This visualizer is made entirely of footage filmed in the Monet’s garden in Giverny, France, October 2020.

This will be the last video painting/visual contemplation for the Interspaces album – unless some visual artist wants to make a proper video artwork to accompany the music. I will now quieten for my writing residency in Finland for the next six months, focusing on my upcoming book on the future society through sonic arts while also finalising the album Earth Variations, to be released in the autumn (depending on the funding).

‘Dancers’ was originally made for the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, in 2010, to be used in the background for the reading of Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s book The Tightrope Walker. In the reading, five voice actors read passages from the book in five different languages: the minimalist ambient/background drone on the track itself is made entirely from the voice of one of these actors – a Ghanaian man reading in Twi – modeled acoustically through a sustained note of a string instrument. The rest of the music was completed at the Cité des arts residency in Paris in 2021, with everything recorded in one improvised take after another during one particularly tender yet elated late night studio session. All subsequent attempts to “improve” these initial takes simply failed to capture the fullness of life in that moment in time, so eventually I left everything as it had first come into being: earnest, imperfect and pristine.

One strong influence on the music – apart from O Superman by Laurie Anderson – was the painting Dance (La Danse) by Henri Matisse, made in 1910. While recording, I suddenly started picturing the painting and the rhythm and movement of its figures and colours. In fact, all my music has been rather strongly influenced by the painting style in question: Fauvism!