Tag Archives: the black dog

The Black Dog – Feral Grace (Dust Science Recordings)

Posted by John Lithium on

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]

Posted by John Lithium on

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.

The Black Dog – Loud Ambient (Dust Science Recordings)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

Making this album was an absolute joy. We used Rothko’s artwork as a major influence. His use of colour fields, blending, mood and scale really helped us build an album of tracks that could stand on their own and also work together as a coherent whole across all the tones we had been working with. It was also a chance to fall back in love with our 909, 808 and 707.

While working on music for several other projects, the “Rothko” project got renamed Loud Ambient because it did not really sit right with the My Brutal Life series. We often talked about what people make of The Black Dog and whether they think we only make ambient music. We do not. Over the last year or so, one of us would be working on something and someone else would say, “That is a Loud Ambient track.” The name stuck. We liked the funny side of it.

With Loud Ambient, everything just fell into place creatively. Surprisingly for us, the tracklisting never changed, just small tweaks here and there. That rarely happens. It marks a first for us as a band. All the stars aligned and the confidence in this album is the strongest we have ever had.

Loud Ambient was made to dance to, something we have not done in a while. We welcome the return to the dance floor with both hands. Will you join us?