Nature Spots is a collection of pieces from 2019, written in downtime while touring with The Simon and Garfunkel Story.

Until September, it had just been the music that poured out of me in my spare time while I was procrastinating on what I thought I was going to write. I had planned on making what I called “The Jigsaw Piece” - a collage of 100 short pieces on simple prompts, e.g. “the power chord”, “the phased pattern”, “the pointillist texture”. The idea was that I'd build these component pieces, and then stick them together like an imaginary sonic lego set. I got some of the way through these pieces, but it was difficult to muster motivation for what was so disconnected from the direct musical impulse. Or you could blame it on poor discipline. I would later plunder the pieces I did make while filling in this album’s details. Things later fell into place on a hiking trip to a bothy in the Brecon Beacons, with one old friend and four new friends. I knew then that the album should called Nature Spots, and every piece would represent a nature spot of some kind. Because nature spots are where you find all the coolest people.

The bothy trip re-contextualised, and provided titles for, many unfinished tracks, as well as conceiving ideas for the other tracks that would explore their opposites. The techno tracks became the imaginary soundtrack of hiking. Ferns and Rippling Reservoir became meditations on the endlessly novel patterns that nature produces, which were more than apparent that day. Beach is a piano improvisation on a theme which had spent at least a year in my head looking for an outlet.

Special thanks:
Aron Sood, for the guitar sample in Rippling Reservoir.
Chris Castellito, for the drums on Stepping Stones, and the positive encouragement.
Dean Elliott, for the access to the S&G Story's acoustic guitar.
UoB Music Department, for the access to timpani and crotales, which I recorded when I was studying there.
Adriene Mishler, for the YouTube series "Yoga With Adriene", which is the source of the sample in Stalactites, and an antidote to the mundane.
David Bruce, Sequoia, Yogev Gabay and Lior Ozeri, for making the stems available for a recording of Bach's prelude from Partita no. 3, which is the source of the drums and bass in Rising Mist.
Solomon MacKilligin, James Duff, Brandon Hopkins, Jacob Hillman and Charles Topp, for the bothy trip, which stays with me as one of the most lovely and real things I've experienced so far.