AN award-winning composer is launching two albums recorded at one of the most remote studios in Europe.
Pianist and violinist Jessica Danz will play from Islands Of The North and Silence, two records she made while looking out over the Atlantic ocean on the island of Great Bernera off the coast of Lewis.
Islands Of The North and Silence complete the trio of albums she is releasing this year, following February’s Under The World, also recorded at Pete Fletcher’s Black Bay Studio.
Fletcher’s 1930s Bechstein grand was a draw to the classically trained musician, who is originally from Perth, Australia and is now based just outside of Glasgow.
Written for solo piano, Islands Of The North is an evocative instrumental album inspired by the era of silent film and Danz’s travels around the northern islands of Scotland, places, she says, “where the sea and the weather are ever-present, powerful forces”.
Combining Danz’s supple, captivating vocals with piano and violin, Silence is a companion piece to Under The World, a collection of songs which explore her own “underworld”; a period between 2011 and 2014 Danz spent without being involved with music.
In 2015 she travelled around Scotland, Scandinavia and the Faroe Islands, performing and composing along the way while discovering sea caves, mountains and ancient churches.
Before the break from music, Danz had been a master interpreter of other’s work. What spurred her to return was a decision to start writing her own compositions.
“It felt like time to believe in myself a bit more as a songwriter and focus on that,” Danz told The National earlier this year.
Whereas Under The World was based in Danz’s “twilight world of trying to find a way out of the darkness”, Silence is “more in the daylight”, she explained.
Making the decision to start writing in her late 30s sparked this year’s flurry of albums, the latter two of which she is launching in parallel before the birth of her baby in November.
The double launch is a sensible use of the limited energy that often accompanies the latter stages of pregnancy, and could be the last time in a while for fans to see the exceptional musician – a new favourite of Kathryn Joseph, no less.
“It’s been a pretty strange experience to be honest,” she says of the challenges of being a pregnant working musician.
“I suspect I’m just going to keep getting even slower over the next two months, hence trying to get these remaining albums out sooner rather than later before life changes in what are probably fairly unimaginable ways.”
September 29, Glad Cafe, Glasgow, 6pm, £10 on the door. www.thegladcafe.co.uk jessicadanz.bandcamp.com www.jessicadanz.com
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