Twinkle³ have teamed up with Sidsel Endresen, Norwegian singer, avant garde pioneer and ECM recording artist. The result is Debris In Lower Earth Orbit, a graceful, yet precarious dance through the weightless slipstream of orbital flotsam and jetsam.
The core trio of Richard Scott (analogue synthesizer and electronics), David Ross (Drosscillator, kantele, mbira) and Clive Bell (shakuhachi and other woodwind) conjured 7 distinct sonic landscapes through an intuitive and delicate interplay first honed on their debut for ini.itu ‘Let’s Make A Solar System’. Sidsel's singular interpretation of this material narrates a melancholy, stream of consciousness style wordplay. It was David Sylvian who brought the trio into contact with Sidsel and driving alone across the lonesome northwest recalls the first instance the album poured into his ears from the car:
“As the first buzz of static and the strains of wind instruments, whose cultural heritage belonged to another continent entirely, filled the vehicle, as Sidsel sang with a soulful melodiousness, an ancient lament for lost souls like myself, hungry ghosts, and those found in remote gas stations, featureless structures illuminated white against a reddening sky, the otherworldliness of the landscape was returned to me. No longer blind or indifferent to the ancient rock formations, the bulky mass, the scale, the striations of stone, gradations of colour changing by degrees animated by the irrepressible sun. The black cactus with yellow plumage, the voluminous boulders, isolated, stranded, graffitied rocks and stones. The coarse granular sands, gritty, unrefined, populated by a stubborn stubble of shrubbery, an almost colour, not quite, failing to pick up on the improbability of their being present at all as an excuse for absence. I traversed a world in which both ancient and modern co-exist and there was beauty and sorrow at every turn. A similar journey will be undertaken by any listener of this remarkable recording.”
As Sylvian rightly states, an absorbing awe and cloaking strangeness both ancient and present permeates each of the small rituals Twinkle3 evoke, with Sidsel voicing a bewitching pre-language that ruminates deeply in each of the pieces. One can expect to have their senses hushed, yet amplified, their imagination ignited, yet warmed by nostalgia and throughout its duration enriched by a magical and wondrous aura.
Clive Bell is a musician, composer and writer with a specialist interest in the shakuhachi (Japanese flute), khene (Thai mouth organ) and other East Asian wind instruments. He has travelled extensively in Japan (where he studied shakuhachi with the master Kohachiro Miyata), Thailand, Laos and Bali, researching music and meeting local practitioners. He joins koto and shamisen players to perform the Japanese classical repertoire. He toured for over a decade with Jah Wobble, including shows at Ronnie Scott’s and the Glastonbury Festival. Clive is the shakuhachi player on Karl Jenkins's album Requiem on EMI Classics, the BAFTA winning animation Kubo And The Two Strings, the final two Harry Potter movies, and The Hobbit. His shakuhachi playing has been featured live on Radio 3’s Late Junction and In Tune. Clive Bell has a substantial recording history as both a solo artist (his 2017 solo album, Asakusa Follies is on the Cusp Editions label) and as a composer for film, TV and theatrical productions (Complicite, Kazuko Hohki, IOU, Whalley Range Allstars). Jazz pianist Taeko Kunishima, Sidsel Endresen, Arild Andersen, Jaki Liebezeit, David Sylvian, David Toop, Jochen Irmler of Faust and Bill Laswell number among Clive Bell's collaborators. Based in Tottenham, London, he writes regularly for the music monthly The Wire.
David Ross is a maker of bizarre rhythmic electronics and is reportedly the only musician to have composed an album entirely using an analogue synthesizer built into a kettle. Alongside these devises, he also plays more conventional instruments such as Jew's harp, kalimba and kantele. As a duo they tenderly explore the points of harmony and contrast between their tools, resulting in beautifully strange improvised pieces of mystic reverence.
Richard Scott is a composer and performer of electronic and improvised music. For much of the last decade he has been dedicated to the compositional and performance possibilities of analogue modular synthesizers. He also works with a variety of digital technologies such as Ambisonics, multichannel diffusion and with instruments such as the Buchla Lightning and Thunder and his self-designed WiGi system developed as an Artistic Resident at STIEM.
