Bird Rib by Leah Kardos

After working on Rococochet (2017) I had a lot of fragments and sketches which for one reason or another I decided not to include; tape transfer experiments, small snippets of performances, room tones & offcuts, etc…, I always thought I would eventually get around to assembling something from these parts. While working with tape I really got into reversing my recordings, and a lot of compositions started out that way - listening to what I had on my tapes backwards and seeing what ideas would spark from that.

Three of the pieces on Bird Rib are cobbled together from those remaining sketches from Rococochet. The other 3 were written into and on top of older pieces that have been reversed: Open Again Eventually uses ‘The Closeness of Distance’ (Machines, 2013), Brundle Beat uses sections of ‘Highly Active Girls’ (also Machines), and Bird Rib was written to ‘DFACE [Practice This Video]’ (Feather Hammer, 2011).

I feel like I’ve uncovered rather than composed these pieces, opting to work intuitively in creating music that the raw materials seemed to suggest for themselves. There are nods in here to 90s-era IDM and trip hop with which I have a strong connection. For this project I worked with some of my go to instruments Mellotron, pianos, keyboards, synths, bells, mallets, but also champagne flutes and cutlery, garden tools, flutes and stylophones.

Leah Kardos is a London-based composer, producer and pianist. Her music combines live instrumental performance with technology and found sounds.