Album 4 - Roseanna Angel Lawrence

My last album ‘Lives and deaths of an actor’ was a music project where all the tracks, apart from a couple, were created on sheet music. There are a few tracks on here where I did use sheet music.The others have none, this separates it structually from the other album.

Many tracks have the very bare bones of melody, with deliberate intense repetition at times.

Some tracks are also using a stronger sound of drums. I felt free to just experiment with sound and soundscapes. I think this was more a case of the sounds taking me somewhere, rather than me controlling the direction they were going.

Sometimes odd accidents would happen and I’d keep those accidents, letting them direct me somewhere else.

I designed some tracks to have a trippy hallucinatory feel to them, a little psychedelic influence, trying to create the feeling of entering a dream, or someone elses dream, and staying there a little while.

I wanted a hypnotic feel to some of the tracks, that the mind can enter some kind of landscape with the sounds. The human brain responds to repeated sounds created in a certain way. Some of the tracks are very long, they expand and change over time. I didn't think I needed to stick to exact times, keeping the tracks short as I did in other albums. I think it's great to go on a musical journey without sticking to theory or the usual time lengths.

I also like creating completely different sound landscapes.

Basically, I just threw away my usual structured rule book and allowed the music to dictate. There are words spoken, not what I'd call singing, just words, repeated. This was someone else's suggestion. I used many Indian instruments and sounds as I really like the texture these bring to music.

I'm a great fan of natural sounds, and using them and this album gave me the freedom to add sounds from an outside environment which was really great. I do take sounds myself from the environment and record them, but i also use other great companies that create natural sounds for composers.

A few tracks follow a rule based design, though most are also much freer to experimentation. There are few modulations here. However, I think the complex textures hold strong despite this.

The story I wrote for this album was three girls from the 19th century living in a very rule-based society, they are a daughters of a strict Vicar and live in a small countryside village. Their father is very devout. He does not allow them to leave the house and never lets them enter the woodland close by, believing it to have an evil influence. That parts of the natural environment is corrupt.

This is their journey into this place of nature, an escape from a very controlling environment.

I imagined them moving through this space and over the hours they become attached to this natural place, much more than the society they lived in. There is a sense of wildness and freedom, also of a haunted, dark passage into time. There may be darkness in the forest but there really isn't anything evil, that's just what the father imagines, though the songs sometimes reflect that there might be, but it has its own beauty and surpasses the existence they were subjected to at home.

I'd like to think of them never returning home. Just staying in this wildnerness and living freely.

Some tracks are supposed to evoke a feeling of hauntedness. You can listen to some tracks freely at the following link.

https://roseannalawrence.bandcamp.com/album/sisters-of-the-night

Derelict Mansion - a very simplistic piano track is in memory of the polish composer Krystoff Komeda. I loved his soundtrack for the Fearless Vampire Killers when I was young, so beautifully haunting. Just pure genius that soundtrack.