Label Description:

Part of the practice of making music involves arriving at and maintaining a sort of coherence and continuity – a heuristic that defines personal rules and parameters, however loosely. These parameters can always be pushed outwards or arbitrarily compressed, but the shape of things needs to make sense, over shorter and longer spans of time and collections of work.

Missals represents something of a suspension of my own rules; it has its own internal language, although it exists in a dialogue with the other records.

There are some obvious entries in the lexicon – some technical, some iconographic. Every track uses my Dynacord tape echo; the overall shape of the record is a cycle; influences are left as pure colours, rather than elided and absorbed.

It is a (rather compact) concept album, in short, and a way both to get some musical ideas off my chest and to kick some of my personal parameters outward a little. Its conceit allows me to take the devotional aspects that seemed to emerge on The Vallum and push them as far as I can within my own worldview.

Missals is presented with heartfelt thanks to Kris Boyle for his extraordinary accompanying video works, and to LADYfingers for their beautiful artwork. Both of these feature in the attached digital booklet.

The opening track, Morning Portal, first appeared on the compilation One More Tune, and is dedicated to the memory of Keith McIvor.