Martin Archer, Jan Todd - Private View (2024) [Hi-Res]

Jan and I took our time and also lavished a lot of care on this release. Because we already did music together in various other contexts, we wanted to make sure this album didn’t just duplicate the ideas we were developing in our other groups and projects. We also decided that we’d play everything on the album ourselves, which we almost managed - Terry Todd joins us for acoustic guitar on one track. So, in amongst making Orchestra Of The Upper Atmosphere’s “Theta Six”, forming, playing gigs, and making an album with new improvising quartet Fjall, plus our own various ongoing studio works, we spent a couple of years making “Private View”. Every so often, one of us would send a new track to the other for completion. You can see who initiated each track by the order of writing credits - the initial idea comes from the first named. We didn’t really tell each other what to do most of the time; each of us completed the track in a way which felt natural and sounded good, sometimes after a bit of discussion, sometimes not. By the time we had completed 12 tracks it felt to us like a good mix of songs, atmospheres and more abstract work.

Jan writes in the sleeve notes “The ideas for Private View began when Martin sent along his first collaboration - a suggestion of Five Words - with indications of where to place them. The words Jan chose were like a treatise on painting, MARK LINE FORM COLOUR FRAME, reminding her of the theories and works of Paul Cézanne, where painterly ideas were imbued with such feeling that the theories seemed an afterthought. This led to more music collaboration where favourite artists’ works were a treasure trove of influence and interpretation. The paintings are not in any order of preference, but works that are timeless and meaningful to the players in some way.”

This feels like a special work. It comes from two musicians who know each other well, working with every bit of skill at our disposal to make a different sort of album full of interest and detail, and which we hope you will want to return to many times. – Martin Archer, June 2024.

Tracklist:
1 Concentric
2 Five Words
3 Suns And Stars
4 Matamua
5 Les Demoiselles
6 Le Soleil Levant
7 Danseuses
8 Ophelia's Lament
9 Self Portrait
10 Hammamet
11 La Jatte
12 Found Objects