Ben Chatwin – Bow Shock (Track Premiere)

South Queensferry-based musician Ben Chatwin has been busy working away in his home studio The Vennel, where he’s created his upcoming album Staccato Signals, set for release on 6 July via Village Green Recordings. With Staccato Signals, the original plan was to create an exclusively electronic record using a selection of analogue and modular synths, but in the end, Chatwin conceded to the machines leading to the incorporation of a number of acoustic elements throughout the album, namely brass and a string quartet.

Staccato Signals is the product of a composer pushing his music past the outer limits of how it was originally conceived to sound, by giving up control over his equipment, other performers, and giving in to his environment. The Skinny are delighted to be premiering Bow Shock, taken from the album, which humbly rolls along before swelling into a gorgeous cacophony of brass and strings.

“Bow Shock started life as quite a heavy electronic track,” Chatwin tells us, “lots of arpeggiated synths and distorted beats, there were also some really brassy synth pads that added a different texture and I wondered if it could be explored further. So I asked Mike Truscott, who played cornet on the last Twilight Sad album, to add some brass – we layered up lots of different parts, replacing a lot of the synth elements.

“Pete Harvey from Modern Studies also came to the studio and played some cello parts towards the end, further pushing the palette of sound into an electronic/acoustic hybrid. I'm fascinated with taking the unruly electronics of someone like Clark or James Holden and colliding it with strings and the sort of classicism someone like Johann Johannsson was known for. The interesting thing for me is not in combining these two worlds but smashing them together.”

Listen to Bow Shock in the SoundCloud player below or here if it's not displaying.

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Staccato Signals is released on 6 Jul via Village Green Recordings