Decade by Benedict Taylor

Benedict Taylor : solo viola

Hundred Years Gallery, 4th May 2022
Recorded and mixed by Graham MacKeachan
Artwork by Montse Gallego
Cover by Sayaka Arai

© & ℗ HYG actuel Recordings 2022

In 2012 I began a recording series called ‘Subverten: For Viola Solo’. It was a personal working project and umbrella for my own viola experimentation, with the aim of at least one release per year. Over time, the project evolved to loosely include other solo string works - a violin album, a multilayered solo album and a viola & distortion album - but always restricted to my ongoing string work. It was, and still is, an annual personal stock-take, a form of creative and technical study, and gradually due to it’s solitary nature, has become one of the freer settings I work within. I liken this project to the closest way of experiencing and engaging with the processes of an individual practitioner of other creative mediums - sculpting, painting, storytelling, real-time experimenting and so on. Freer doesn’t mean easier however, and the process has been a very challenging one in many ways.

Alongside the creative process, I also had an interest in the apparent mystification surrounding the notion of a ‘solo album’ or a ‘debut solo’ and suchlike. With the amount of time we spend in private practice, and with modern recording equipment and tools so readily available, it felt normal to make solo albums regularly: If I play all the time and am attempting to make new work and find new directions, then I should be aiming for some amount of this time invested to result in solo publication or release.

After 10 years this project, as well as pushing me to look and go further, has also helped to clarify and focus what I am doing (or at least attempting to do), shedding some light on ongoing repetitive processes that I’m actively involved in. Marking its 10th year, Decade is also the 10th entirely solo recording, and 11th solo record so far.

Hundred Years Gallery has been a home to numerous players and artists in the improvised and new music world. It has supported and promoted, given creative freedom to artists requiring space and time, welcomed musicians from all over the world, and is a bastion of and friend to the arts, free music and creative thinking in London. Many thanks to Montse Gallego & Graham Makeachan for the opportunity to create this album, and for their continued support and development of so much new work that is taking place in East London.

Benedict Taylor

Tracklist

1.	Part I	11:51

2.	Part II	9:45

3.	Part III	6:17

4.	Part IV	6:50

5.	Part V	7:44

6.	Part VI	2:11

7.	Part VII	3:20

8.	Part VIII	14:22

Credits

released July 8, 2022

License