Alan M. Jackson has pledged to share the proceeds from his new track Mediation One in a 50/50 split with his musical collaborators: a choir of birds from his West Sussex garden and another from the South Downs. (The birds’ half of the money goes toward the purchase of high quality RSPB bird food.)
Meditation One (feat. NATURE) features Alan M Jackson on fujara, gong, and modular bells accompanied by West Sussex peri-urban birds (the first bird choir) and the Birds of the South Downs (second bird choir).
Alan’s performance is processed through the Kyma CrossFilter with a “wintry” impulse response: several years ago, he brought a field recorder along on a skiing trip in the French Alps where he captured people skiing past, around and down the slope of some scratchy sounding hard-pack snow which became the impulse response for this spring (as in the season) reverberation.
The “first choir” of birds was recorded from Alan’s studio window (he had to EQ away the traffic noise). He decided to perform outdoors along with this track on a local iron-age hill fort. While he was was mixing, he noticed that the birds around him were impressively louder and clearer than the first choir, so he stopped and set up his mics to record them. But by the time he was ready they’d gone quiet. That’s when he realized that the birds had been reacting to hearing the recording of the first choir (probably in a “stressed out, territorial, get-off-my-hill, kind of way”). So he alternated between playing short sections of the first bird choir, then stopping to record the second choir’s reactions.
The cover art comes from a water color painted by Alan on top of the same hill at sunset during the planetary alignment (the white dot is Venus). It’s an hour hike down from the top so staying to paint the sunset meant he had to stumble back in the dark (that part is not depicted in the painting).