Meet Correspondence

CORRESPONDENCE was my main music project between 2016 and 2020, following a decade of hobbyist solo recording experiments and a couple of years playing guitar in a noisy pop-rock band; Molars.

I was keen to explore new approaches and to reflect more honestly the music I was into at that time. I also had far more spare time on my hands back then, and enough patience to spend hours editing samples and weaving together these intricate sound patterns. - Correspondence

Earlier Music - Released 2018
Tone Formation A was the first track I made under the Correspondence name, released on cassette in 2016 with an extended version of Tone Formation B on the other side. I was into mid-century minimalism and process-based composition at the time, and these were essentially demos, using simple sequences and layers of tones generated by a Casiotone keyboard.

The other tracks on the Earlier Music collection take a similarly lo-fi approach, using guitar and percussion samples I recorded. I started learning more towards MIDI instruments with the album Wave Recital, which came out in 2017 on Audiobulb Records. - Correspondence

Wave Recital - Released 2017
The lead track Playing Field is fairly representative of what I was trying to achieve, with maybe a few too many ideas thrown into the mix, and it ended up getting played on late night BBC Radio 3 and featured on a few blogs.

Another early track written for the album was The North Sea, which features a rough tape recording of waves on the North Yorkshire coast. It's very straightforward, just one chord which gradually falls out of sequence then re-converges. I revisited this process on a piano album I made in lockdown, and there's also a demo version played on the old Casiotone. - Correspondence

Four Versions - Released 2018
After Wave Recital, I had plans for live performances which never happened, but exist as rearranged tracks on an EP named Four Versions. I was more interested in ambient, kankyō ongaku and durational drone music at that time, letting ideas play out in the background with limited human intervention.

With Holding Cycle (version) I found some odd glitches and occurrences when extending the harp samples, which give it a completely different atmosphere to the original track. I carried on reworking existing material over the next couple of years, eventually compiling On + On as a sort of follow-up album. - Correspondence

On + On - Released 2020
In Copenhagen was written after a trip there in January 2019, and there is a specific visual reference for this track: Naja Salto's Havet omkring Danmark (The sea around Denmark) which is a tapestry piece I saw at the Design Museum. The track explores different variations of a short sequence of notes, falling into stillness as the chimes are replaced by drones.

Another loop-based track is Parquet Arpeggios which moves around an 8-note motif that features on Area of Study, On Again, and elsewhere. It's the sort of track I would love to hear played by a live ensemble, and the gradual reverb fade at the end is supposed to bring to mind a big, bright concert hall with high ceilings and wooden floors. Maybe I'll find time to revisit those live performance ideas someday!
I’m excited to give these tracks a new lease of life through the Free Music Archive and enable anyone to share and make use of them under a CC BY license.

There's also an intersection here with my professional interests as an academic librarian, advocating for open access publication of research outputs under similar terms.

It was fun to revisit these tracks and pick out some favorites for this post! I've recently returned to the practice of field recording in a deeper way as the basis for new compositions, rather than just background texture. - Correspondence