Safe Operating Space – audio stanzas constructed with music – composer Tullis Rennie

Listeners engage in a sequence of mmusical abstract storytelling. Each track becomes a room for people to inhabit, each track is quite unified  and it is for the listener to kind of wander around, perhaps no human guide, examine what’s on the shelf like in a video game.

This studio production now functions as a starting point for some live shows around the time of the release, working with the same musicians. These tracks will then morph and flourish into new forms and into further, different music.

Tullis Rennis – photo Dave Brown

I asked Tullis for more details of how he worked on this album.

“We played one gig the night before the recording session, and had never improvised freely together before. During the session there was no hierarchy whatsoever – a completely ‘flat’ relationship where all players and sounds were considered equal.

“All the initial recordings were live, recorded in quite an old-school way, actually – we were all in the same live room and while everyone was individually mic-ed up there was a fair amount of bleed between the mics, plus my live electronics as part of the ensemble were projected into the room through loudspeakers so we could hear them. No headphones or iso booths etc.

“The resulting album is a mixture: tracks 07 ‘Precarity’ and 10 ‘Scarcity’ for example are ‘lifted’ straight from the initial live room, the recordings are hardly touched. 02 ‘Asunder’ is at the other end of the scale, a predominantly electronic piece. Many of the others shift between these two poles For me, the unity comes from conceiving this as a single body of work, one which is built on the same source materials.

“The themes and ideas expressed in the titles and the way the album has been shaped are based on what was running through my mind while working solo in a studio for weeks on end, on instrumental tracks. This ranges from global heating, to Generative AI, to Kate Bush. All these things are connected, in my head.

“The production of the album is indeed often highly processed — I took those recordings and worked with them for a number of months, sometimes working with a short phrase lifted from one or two seconds of the longer improvisation.

“As the days and evenings in my shed got progressively colder, I found myself thinking about themes of warmth, heat, things catching fire, and the futile human endeavour of trying to preserve and recreate the present environmental status quo, while simultaneously enacting the slow cancellation of its future. According to recent scientific study, the ‘safe operating space for humanity’ [Rockström et al., 2009] on Earth is in jeopardy. Many global systems are approaching or already beyond the stable range in which modern civilisations emerged.”

Do You Wanna Hear About The Deal That I’m Making? features Dee’s searching saxophone over a deep cello bassline improvised by Tara, a combination that seemed to me to unconsciously channel a kind of film noir soundtrack to these sketchy backroom deals by fossil fuel companies and governments…

Many will notice that the track title is a direct quotation from the lyrics of Running Up That Hill by Kate Bush. It struck me that the time when the song became popular with an entirely new audience after featuring in Stranger Things was when the UK Conservative government was at a particularly low ebb, trying to sell short term, grubby political arguments for how we stay within +1.5 degrees (or not) – the egocentric political class pouring fuel and water onto the flames at the same time. The song’s lyrics seemed to fit that period startlingly well, so I borrowed a line, a nod to this imaginary instrumental counterpart to that whole political scene.

The album is built from a completely improvised recording session where Rennie (electronics) joins forces with Preetha Narayanan (violin), Tara Franks (cello), Cath Roberts (baritone sax), and Dee Byrne (alto sax). Working solo in his Hastings studio shed, Rennie plays alongside, against and around these ensemble recordings using analogue drum machines and synthesisers.

Safe Operating Space is released on Efpi Records on 18 October 2024. Follow this link for more information.

Efpi is both an independent record label and an umbrella organisation working to promote the activities of an emerging generation of musicians working across all areas of contemporary jazz, improvised and experimental music.