Retrospective: Richard Bolam at 50 Stay In Lane, 2000 Five-track audio CD with inkjet printed sleeve
Stay In Lane is my favourite of the Hard Shoulder CDs. Itʼs not exactly easy listening, but it feels very conceptually and musically coherent. Please feel free to disagree. The collection is a contemplation on travel, and all tracks have some conceptual element to them that relates to my own experience of travel or places I have been. The tracks are all technical experiments to some degree, but all created intuitively. Cuilin is one of my favourite Hard Shoulder tracks and I can listen to it regularly. The construction was quite simple and the sounds are guitar feedback samples, slowed drastically and then panned around. Named after the famous mountain ridge in Skye, UK, as if it was the sound of the mountains scraping against the sky. Notched Ridge is the translation of the Gaelic “Aonach Eagach”, another mountain ridge in Glen Coe, Scotland, UK. This is a strict experiment, building up the track with short, abstract audio sequences, then removing them one by one in the order they were added. Warmed By The Sun is an attempt to recreate a day I had on the mountain Cul Mor, Sutherland, Scotland, UK, sometime in the 1990s. It was a sparkling clear day in the summer, but the wind was so strong it was impossible to stand upright on the top. However, I fell asleep, warmed by the sun, in a sheltered hollow just a few yards from the summit. I could hear other people passing by, just a few feet away, indicated by the sound of their clothes flapping violently in the wind. The track is constructed of many overlapping samples of contrasting timbres, all at the same musical pitch. Motion Sickness is another purely experimental track, but randomly constructed that builds and builds and then just stops. An appropriate title, I think.
The Beach is an atmosphere invoking an imagined flight, low over a long, flat beach. All the tracks were created with Music 2000 for the Playstation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_2000
Richard Bolam, November 2012 http://richardbolamat50.wordpress.com http://hardshoulder.net