An experiment in 'musicollage' built around the themes of evolutionary biology, astronomy, love and the light of reason over superstition. It is a musical diary kept over the course of a year and edited, mixed and sequenced for another using contributions from the musicians via the internet.
The 12-track presentation available here is just one way of arranging the 38 separate segments recorded for the project.

Read the below before listening, if possible.

Fortress

It was late summer 2008. 'Work' on my third album ‘Wooden Man, Made of Smoke’ was stalling and performing live was becoming a undesirable distraction from burgeoning family life. The inspiration was drying up like a yellow stream in full sun and I gazed out on to a musical desert…

One night in the shed a single thought presented itself, ‘my life is channelled through a fortress’ and some simple chords. This was the seed. I planted it. I was on fertile soil after all.

What followed took the appearance of a musical diary, new ideas coming sporadically in the form of nursery songs at bedtime for my daughter or simple melodies to hum around the house in attempts to amuse my newly born son. My family were and remain my primary inspiration but during this period I was reading Dawkins, Shubin and Dennett among others and my mind buzzed with the understanding of my evolutionary origins and direct physical relationship with the universe, past, present and future. My two young children brought this realisation into incredible focus and the writing took off like a well-bred charger.

Generally speaking each idea was recorded on the night (or early morning) it was conceived. I would go into the shed around 11pm and lay multiple guitar tracks down, then harmonise with myself until I could stay awake no longer. Another day, another Fortress contribution became the norm.

I came to realise that this music was an extension of my phenotype, the physical expression of the genes within my cells and that it would be possible to deduce their existence purely by listening to this record – in the sense of civilisation being the phenotype of humanity. This gave the music new gravitas in my mind and I set to work to make it worthy of the concept. Recombination breeds variation so I dipped into the 'phene' pool of musically gifted friends to request arrangements and they did so with enormous generosity and ability. I gave no instructions other than my initial recordings and allowed the piece to evolve without ever setting parameters or sighting a goal. No one (including me) could foresee where it was going or how it would get there, I was holding the wheel but the road was turning as it pleased. It was a fascinating experience.

As mixing progressed fragments of many of the arrangements were transplanted throughout the piece where they found new niches in which to dwell. These specific lengths of phenotypic expression ('phenes') were essentially sieved through a sonic filter - that of the existing music and my opinion - which, in a process reminiscent of natural selection served to trap each fragment in its place of best fit.
I was also aware that I was performing my own brand of 'phenetic' engineering, artificially tinkering with the organic offerings to create my perfect new creature. Mixing thus became an extension of the writing process and everything shifted, sometimes seismically, under the blindfold guidance of the band.

In these new environments the individual lines and chords took the form of deliberate performances by unreal performers. Neither the musicians who played them nor I who placed them elsewhere could be said to have 'arranged' the final collage, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. The sheer scope of possibilities provided more evidence that the whole piece was a coherent entity, existing simultaneously as individual functional parts and a living colony of such. Whatever I tried, it worked. Indeed, the aptly named 'musicollage' is constructed entirely from musical segments designed for, and appearing in, other passages. The music is riddled with examples and spotting them could prove an interesting project for someone with too much time and such an inclination. Identifying the position of the source material might be trickier.

As the various sections began to fall together Fortress took on the guise of an ecosystem, the interactions of multiple entities functioning as a complex unit. To this end the piece is intended to be heard as a single ‘song’ in the same way that you'd take in a landscape. However I had the listener in mind when, for ease of reference and movement around the musical space, I divided the record into a natural sounding twelve tracks. The artwork evolved through email conversations and moves across Europe, the design hanging like a canopy above the project. The gravitational pull of the 'album' format proved too strong to resist.

I cannot thank the band enough for making Fortress into something beyond my capabilities.

During final mixing I decided to also release the individual parts so that people could form their own connections, linking up the various themes in whatever way they found most pleasing. There are a positively galactic number of ways to arrange the 38 musical 'bricks' and thus build your very own Fortress. Inadvertently we also stumble upon the rarest of opportunities, that of the 'shuffle' function possessing the potential for delight rather than disappointment.

There is inevitably a multitude of recurrent and concurrent themes both musically and lyrically but the main concept can be summarised thus: the limitless power of love coupled with the light of reason over superstition and the incredible sensation of realising myself to be a link in an unbroken chain of replicating scraps of stardust from the very beginning of life on earth, possibly the Universe. A family tree to be proud of.

It did not escape my notice that 2009 was the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Darwin's masterpiece. I hope that in this presentation I have been able to show, despite the ever-present organised attempts to discredit him over so many years, that even his idea is still evolving. Powerful is the force of being right.

What is the 'Fortress'? The best expression of it I have found is in these words:

"When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free--free to think, to express my thoughts--free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination's wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free!" Robert G. Ingersoll.


Some people seem to think that the consequences of evolution are such that we have no reason to love each other. Far from it, believe it is our duty to love one another simply because we can.

Fortress is an honest record. It is full of joy and hope with the blinkers removed. Nick.