Nxs800 [LP]

Geoff Kirkwood (Man Power)I'd gained some notoriety as a music producer and DJ but I hit a horrible case of writers block around 2018. Later, in the middle of lockdown, I was emboldened enough to apply for an artist in residence position at a big regional opera house. I submitted a ridiculously ambitious plan for what I would like to do as a project, and to my absolute shock I was selected for the position. I got as far as suggesting writing a full symphony to be performed by an orchestra. The biggest issue for me, beyond raising the money to pay for everything, was how does a person actually write a symphony?I was introduced to Fiona Brice, a multi instrumentalist and orchestral arranger. She's also a recording artist who releases on Bella Union. On top of that, she's a violinist who used to be part of the band Placebo and who used to appear regularly playing for other bands on things like Top of the Pops. Not only was Fiona uniquely placed to not look down on the strange provenance of someone from an acid house background wanting to write a symphony, but more to the point we really hit it off from day one. Fiona coached me in the essentials of writing for an orchestra, and then I went off and wrote the 8 movements.I'd love to say I labored for years over this bit, but it took about 2 weeks in total. I'd also love to say what I wrote was a complete symphony, but the version of this which is solely me feels like looking at something without your glasses on. The shape, feel, and borders were all there, but the definition was absent. Fiona taught me the broad language of a symphony, but without her it would have lacked all intonation, nuance, and detail. Where I had shaped ideas with a hammer, she brought out my meaning with precision using a scalpel. I think the prodigiously quick turnaround for the music is as much proof of how conceptually and musically aligned Fiona and I are. I know we're both incredibly proud of what we've created.The work itself is inspired by the working class experience, but it's also a comment on how we get to decide what we are and how we're defined, and we get to choose what we do to prove these things. The original recording was contractually impossible to ever share again, so we re-recorded it. In many ways it's a record that feels like it shouldn't exist, which is why we're all so happy that it does.