Simon McCorry & Wodwo - Every Creeping Thing (2024)

Simon McCorry is a composer based in Gloucestershire creating music and sound design mainly for theatre and contemporary dance, working with companies such as Old Vic Productions, Tiata Fahodzi, House of Absolute, Javaad Alipoor Company & Fabula Collective. Simon is a cellist, often using the instrument in his work processed and combined with electronics, field recordings, and other instruments. His work has been described as “electro-orchestral drone-scapes of, by turns, gauzy intimacy and soaring grandeur” MOJO. He has recently collaborated with artists including Andrew Heath, anthéne, Requiem and, on this record, Wodwo.

Wodwo is the alias of Derbyshire-based musician Ray Robinson. An award-winning novelist and coveted screenwriter, Robinson's foray into the music world began in 2018, and his gentle ambient guitar and lush neo-classical compositions have quickly attracted a blossoming legion of fans. Ray also records as one half of JARR, alongside fellow Brit, Jon Attwood (Yellow6). Their albums have been released by Hush Hush Records and on the Sound in Silence imprint. Ray's solo output has appeared on NCTMMRN, Soundtracking The Void, Submarine Broadcasting Company and Fallow.

Every Creeping Thing is a celebration of mud and moss and slugs and bugs and roots and damp – songs of the forgotten, the small, the overlooked. A musical approach of letting things unfold and follow their path, passing material back and forth, leaving space and following a philosophy of less is more. A journey that evolved through coincidences, and shared interests in literature and the natural world – the music took its course, taking on its own life.

Guitar, cello, and modular synth are played, processed, and recorded live. Nothing is sequenced or quantised, maintaining an organic breath-like quality flowing throughout the tracks. Through the music’s echoes, whisperings, creeks, calls, fluttering and murmurings – sometimes as walls of sound, often as spiderweb-fine textures – Every Creeping Thing invites the listener to immerse themselves in the intricate net of the beauty of the more-than-human world.

The cover art illustrates John Masefield's lines from The Everlasting Mercy: ‘A rushing comet, crackling, numbing the folk with fear of judgement coming.’ Taken from their collection, The Book of Comets, the artists Christopher Crouch and Cherish Marrington worked together to create something that would be a synthesis of their practices, but which would also propel them into new ways of thinking about representing their ideas. However, these illustrations are less about comets and more about the artists’ retreat into the imaginary.

The track titles for Every Creeping Thing are from Jacob Polley’s wonderful poetry collection, Jackself, which Ray happened to be reading at the time of this collaboration. As the album was coming together, he felt a real connection between the sometimes off-kilter, ‘organic’ music he and Simon were creating and Jacob’s collection. It felt as if they were inhabiting similar worlds: a world of frosty mornings, kidney-coloured pools, rosehips, and buzzards’ wings.