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4 June 2020

SALT: On keeping a record


Alice Humphries Image: Alice Humphries  

Record noun

…a thing constituting a piece of evidence about the past...

I love going to concerts. Experiencing music in that moment, sitting in a room with performers and audience. That moment of silence at the end of a performance, just before the applause, is a strangely melancholic moment. It's over. Live music is a durational art - once the last echo fades, you can't go back.

Live music is a wonderful thing.

So, in this brave new world of music streaming and instant gratification, why release an album? Well there are many reasons, but a big part for me is that I want to keep a record. A record of my musical explorations over time.

It's been 7.5 years since I released my first album Ecila, which was such a joy to make, and though I find genre labels somewhat confining, it is definitely jazz. Since that time, I have taken a completely different direction - wandering off into contemporary classical music. Not from any real conscious choice, but because I was following my musical curiosity to know more about the kind of music I was listening to. I wanted to know how it worked.

I now realise that I will never know how 'it' works, as 'it' keeps changing and evolving, and following my curiosity has meant the goal posts keep shifting. The journey is what it's all about, and I've had a lot of fun over the last few years composing for everything from full orchestra to solo double-bell trumpet.

My latest release, SALT, is a collection of chamber and solo works that explore connections between human emotion and natural phenomena. It is an eclectic record of music that has been written over the last two-three years. It's a record of this period of my creative life, and includes wonderful performances by the Letter String Quartet, Syzygy Ensemble, and my long-time friend and extraordinary trumpet player, Callum G'Froerer.

> SALT will be released on 5 June. You can purchase this digital-only release through Bandcamp.



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