Liverpool based composer Dialect started work on his fifth album Atlas Of Green while at Bidston Observatory Artistic Research Centre on Merseyside's Wirral Peninsula, where the musician grew up. Taking influence from his surroundings, the album explores ideas born from both science fiction and ecology, and is presented as the work of a fictional musician named Green. Here Andrew PM Hunt describes how the work of other musicians also had an effect on the latest instalment in his album series as Dialect.

“I always find making a list of influences like this a bit of a challenge. Partly because I suspect that the sounds I’m least conscious of as they enter my ears are the ones which end up embedding themselves deepest in my psyche, and partly because my approach to working with sound is that of collage. Not just pasting together sounds but whole approaches; one minute I’m an improvisor, the next an engineer, a tinkerer, a composer, a songwriter.

As such, it can be hard to answer the age old question “How did I get here?” The music in this mix offers some sort of fleeting answer – these pieces of music all made an impression on me as I was working on Atlas Of Green, and often remained as some sort of talisman throughout the project.

The simple hocketing of Candace Natvig inspired my use of the cassette four-track as a switching four voice sampler, the spectral harmonics of Horațiu Râdulescu and the dry patience of Jürg Frey both impacted my use of strings as did the lilting melodies of the Serbian folk singers I sampled on “Late Fragment”.

Elsewhere the austere clicks of Oren Ambarchi prompted my use of simple sine waves across much of the record and it would be remiss for me not to give a nod to Ursula K Le Quin and Todd Barton's Music And Poetry Of The Kesh since her book Always Coming Home was such a key influence. Generally I was quite drawn during this period to folk music and pieces with relatively simple arrangements where the texture and grain of the instruments really came through.

The process of making this mix seemed to chime with my image of Green, working away in some future, trying to make sense of the past by sifting through broken relics, and in the process tracing their surroundings and their inner life...”

Tracklist

Ilona Papečkytė “Šuliny Šaltini”
Birds Of Venezuela & Jean C Roché “Gran Sabana” / Horațiu Râdulescu “Intimate Rituals” (excerpt)
Nasta Stepanović “Čobanska Pesma Bez Reči (Shepherd’s Song Without Words)”
Franzsepp Inauen “Appenzeller Yodel With Moving Coins”
Milja Barbulović & Miladinka Radulović “Poziv Na Sastanak (Call For A Lover’s Meeting)”
Ursula K Le Guin & Todd Barton “Heron Dance”
Candace Natvig “One, Not Two”
Paul Dresher “Night Songs: We Only Came - Dream Music”
Eugeniusz Runik “Dixi”
David Behrman “Touch Tones”
Unknown Artist “Žanjem Žito Pa Ga Lepo Slažem (I'm Reaping Wheat And Sowing It Well)”
Jürg Frey “Petit Fragment De Paysage”
Oren Ambarchi “Corkscrew” / R Carlos Nakai “December Snow”

Read Abi Bliss's interview with Dialect in The Wire 487. Wire subscribers can also read the article online via the digital magazine library.