Tube V
Tube V is a five-track, 12-minute EP that transforms field recordings from the London Underground and voice into immersive compositions.
It explores the intersection of urban, industrial environments and the natural world, blending ambient textures with personal experience.
Each track tells a distinct story through capturing specific moments and emotions from the time of recording, with voice and natural sounds woven throughout to create a layered, evocative musical experience.
It's difficult to know when my phobia of the tube began. But at some point something changed, and I started to experience an increasing dread of it. Something about the very shape of it — the enclosure, the beneath-the-ground feeling, the crush of people — meant that getting stuck in tunnels, even for a few minutes, would cause me to break out in a sweat. Every journey became increasingly distressing, and I felt panic rising within me every time the doors closed.
Maybe to distract myself, I began to record my moments of fear and all that was happening around me at these times.
Some of what you hear in Tube V is about this. But alongside the fear, there is also a beautiful familiarity for me in the sounds of the London Underground. I grew up right next to Wimbledon Park station, and I remember falling asleep as a child to the squeak of brakes and the clunking, soothing rhythms of the trains. The familiar announcements, the snippets of conversation, the sounds of life are all deeply nostalgic and soothing.
I have noticed that the tube, with its long windpipe, is a singer like me. At times in Tube V, I sing a duet with it.
I wanted to mix natural sounds including birdsong, rain, waves and stones on the beach into the industrial, so that you are not always sure what is natural and what is mechanical or human-made. Is it a voice, or is it a train? Almost like mixing paints to form new colours, I blended these sounds perhaps to find my way back to nature, and to ease that grief of urban disconnection.
After years in the classical music world as an opera singer and flautist, discovering Ableton and especially the Simpler has been literally life-changing. For many years there had been music running around in my head with no way to capture it. Back when I first started composing, I had only an 8-track recorder with a CD burner. I tried to make new sounds using my voice and recording things from around the house, but it was never quite the music I heard in my head.
I sample sounds with my Zoom H2n recorder, the same one I used to record my singing lessons on, and I carry it everywhere, especially on the London Underground.
When I first discovered Ableton and the Simpler, I felt almost feverish with possibility. Even now, I am dazzled by the opportunity it gives you to make your own, totally unique instruments out of anything, even the subterranean sounds of the city beneath your feet.