The Black Dog – Feral Grace (Dust Science Recordings)

Label Description: Feral Grace was written around old childhood places reclaimed by nature, or replaced by new housing estates. Places long forgotten, their purpose discarded as the world moved on. Yet the memories stay there, caught in the undergrowth, thought of once in a while.

We remember gathering leaf moss from the woods for our tomato plants. Building dams in shallow streams. Filling our wellies with frog spawn and carrying it home like treasure. Small acts that felt large at the time.

Fishing banks where we spent hours. Not talking, just sharing food. Two cans of shandy bass and egg sandwiches. The water long drained and the people gone, but if you look hard enough you can still see the faint outline of where it once was.

Some places still hold the paths where people once walked to work. The tracks remain cut into the land, but the work itself has gone. Trades smashed during the years of Thatcher, ripping communities apart. That memory still lives on. You see it when a scab walks into the pub. Some things are never forgotten.

The music on Feral Grace sits between then and now. A bridge between memory and the present day. A last spell cast before those memories fade and the fingerprints disappear.

Who will know we were here at all?

Perhaps only a distant echo left behind in our Feral Grace.

Written, Mixed, Produced and Mastered By The Black Dog – 353

The Black Dog – Music For Real Airports (Box Set 2) [Dust Science Recordings]

Label Description: Collected together for the first time, this five-CD box set brings together the various works from the Music For Real Airports project.

The collection not only includes Music For Real Airports, Music For Airport Lounges, and Music For Dead Airports, but also features a substantial amount of new, unheard material, alternate mixes and live recordings taken from our archive. This second box set reflects a long and uneasy relationship with airports.

After years spent sitting in airports, travelling to and from gigs, we have seen past the polished surfaces and the promises of comfort and efficiency. They present a controlled fiction, a managed calm built on delay, surveillance and routine.

Across five hours of music, much of it previously unheard and available for the first time, the box set confronts the modern reality of travel and the corporate structures that shape it. The music documents these spaces as they are experienced rather than as they are sold.