looking out | looking up – a cellar full of noise

Description

We are a cellar full of noise. We’ve been friends and colleagues since studying at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and were brought together by Matthew Whiteside for the 2017 The Night With… season.

After our first concert, audience member Penn Jilette said ‘I went down into that cellar full of noise and it was just wonderful, one of the greatest shows I’ve ever seen’ and this is where we got our name. Having revisited the programme we performed on that Glasgow night in the years since, we met again in 2021 to record this album that includes recently composed pieces, and improvisations based on Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Tierkreis.

There is a kind of physicality in all the music on this album, a sense of scale, proximity, movement. Sounds you can observe passing by, sounds to inhabit, sounds seeming to come from inside your own head. It is this sense of your own place in this sounding world that defines looking out | looking up.

For us, it was exciting to work on translating the live show into a recorded
experience, finding ways to link the pieces together in the same playful spirit as our live performances, as we further explored the boundaries between improvisation and composition. Feeling the ways that improvising together affected other elements of our performance, we became even more playful in the ways we interpreted the music.