BY RICHARD LAURENCE
We would like to welcome Richard in his first blog with CutCommon.
At its simplest, Gifts From Crows is my neoclassical music project. I compose and record ambient piano music, and it’s called Gifts From Crows.
That’s what I tell most people. But if I’m being honest, the real story and its significance is somewhat more complicated than that.
The real story starts with an ancient upright piano, 140 years old, passed down from generation to generation. It stood in the front room when we were children, and I would sit on the music stool slowly caressing the keys whilst my foot pressed the piano’s sustain pedal, letting its rich sound envelop me – my own private cathedral.
A few years ago, the same piano found its way back to me and, although I hadn’t played for years, the muscle memory of scales and chords almost instantly re-awakened. The magical patterns of self-made music were once again filling the rooms of our home.
Grief is a long journey with many roads, and music is the road I took to find some kind of peace; to restore a sense of balance.
The real story also includes a bereavement. Two years ago, my younger brother Damian sadly passed away. The experience of losing someone so close, and before their time, affected me in ways I struggled to come to terms with.
Grieving is a process everybody goes through in their own way. Funerals, remembrance services, talking to family and friends – they all help in dealing with the intense pain you experience in the immediate aftermath of losing someone. But grief is a long journey with many roads, and music is the road I took to find some kind of peace; to restore a sense of balance.
I always used to write music. From my mid-teens, it was pretty much the only thing I wanted to do. But then, in my 30s, inexplicably and almost without really noticing, I stopped.
Looking back now, it seems unthinkable that you would stop doing something that was seemingly a fundamental part of your make-up. It took Damian’s passing for me to step back from the relentless rush of life, and reflect on the things that were really important to me.
Gifts From Crows was literally born out of that realisation. The process of composing music returned with a fierce urgency and, over the next six months, I wrote many pieces, eight of which would eventually become the album Holding a Thought Forever.
Composing has always been a cathartic process for me, a way to resolve internal conflict, to find meaning to unanswerable questions. In the past, I have often written songs. This time, the abstraction of instrumental music was much more fitting, allowing me more scope to reconcile the sense of loss in the face of an indifferent world.
Slowly, one piece at a time, the themes for the album started to make themselves known to me. The first of these is rediscovery, most aptly addressed by the track, Remembering Who and What We Are.
Growing up, and throughout our adult lives, we put on many masks, play out many roles. But there comes a point when it is time to just be as close to our authentic selves as we can, to stop pretending and accept who we truly are.
I don’t believe healing can really begin unless you make a genuine commitment to do this. I ended up writing a second piece called Something Thought Lost is Found in deep and honest gratitude that the gift to play and compose music had come back to save me at a time when I most needed it.
The theme that runs throughout the album is loss, and the track But When You Sleep was composed as a meditation on those who are no longer here. The beautiful video by Helena Whitten perfectly captures the dark undercurrents of the piece as the solitary figure stands motionless, almost outside of time whilst the world continues without them.
Other pieces too reflect upon the complex emotions you are left with once someone has died. Sometimes we ask too much of the people we love. Our intentions are good and we want them to do the best for themselves. But asking them to achieve more than they are capable not only damages our relationships, but can also be fatally destructive to the person involved. You Can’t Get There From Here is about such a situation.
Without Beauty There Is No Hope is the penultimate piece of the song cycle. When my brother was still here, he would often recount moments experienced in nature, a sunset or a view, that took his breath away. Even though he interpreted life through the discipline of philosophy, he still keenly felt the sympathetic background that nature often provides to the twists and turns of our daily lives. After he died, I realised that he could no longer see these things.
The album closes with the piece No Place In This World. The concept of ‘home’ is a fundamental one, not just for ourselves but for all living things. Without somewhere to take refuge and call our own then we cannot feel safe, and we have no foundation upon which to build our lives.
Home is not just a physical place. It is also a spiritual necessity to feel that we belong. If we are not among those who understand us, with whom we can be ourselves, then we will still struggle with a profound emptiness – a dislocation from reality and with the sense that we have ‘no place in this world’.
And so the theme of personal loss opens out to consider the wider world, the damage that we are doing to the planet, our collective home. This theme is most directly addressed through the track As Nature Returns.
We saw nature returning, and many of us noticed things we had not properly seen since childhood.
Whilst it is the opening track of the album, it was the last piece composed, written one month into the coronavirus lockdown. As the world economy was brought to a standstill, it gave us all a chance to re-evaluate our relationship with nature. In Europe, it was spring and so we saw nature returning, and many of us noticed things we had not properly seen since childhood.
For a brief time, it felt like nature was making a comeback after decades of industrial pollution and population growth had caused huge damage to the environment. It made us think about the sort of world we want to live in but it also reminded us that, once mankind is gone, nature will reclaim the cities once more.
However, it was also the collective tragedy of the coronavirus pandemic that was the final trigger that brought Gifts From Crows to fruition. Finding myself with much more time than I’d had for years, I turned my hand to recording these compositions, alone with the piano and some newly acquired sample libraries.
I cannot over-state the cathartic nature of this process. Getting the sound out of your head and into a format that you can share with others is truly liberating.
So Holding a Thought Forever was born out of a personal loss and into a world of shared loss, uncertainty, and a general sense that life is increasingly precarious. As the world continues to struggle with the impact of the coronavirus, I hope that in some small way people can find solace in the album, be uplifted by these pieces, and ultimately know that hope is the only road out of these dark times.
Gifts From Crows’ music is widely available on distribution channels, with debut album Holding a Thought Forever released on streaming platforms on 19 February. Follow on Instagram and YouTube.
