Track By Track: Ben Chatwin on Heat & Entropy

With a background in minimalism, Chatwin has developed his sound since first album The Sleeper Awakes to include electronic textures alongside his obvious love of modern classical composition. Heat & Entropy is a record which takes unusual instruments such as the hammer dulcimer and dulcitone and marries them to digital technologies. Strings - often the strings found inside a piano - are used as a percussive element and add a depth and beauty to a record which is a celebration of the piano....and perhaps the first concept album about the Firth of Forth.

Below, you can listen to the album while Chatwin takes us through it track by gorgeous track.

Inflexion

The opening track came out of a simple motif that I created using a dulcitone which is an old (as in late 19th century old) piano-esque instrument that uses tuning forks instead of strings to produce the sound. I used the dulcitone extensively on my previous album The Sleeper Awakes and as I like to approach each album differently I promised myself I wasnt going to use it on Heat & Entropy. But I needed an opener and sat down to play it one day and this happened.

Gravitational Bodies

This track has actually been around in one form or another for some years and I would occasionally play it live when performing as Talvihorros, I don’t know why- it never quite worked but there was something about it I liked. I completely re-wrote the first half of it using my live set-up which is an analogue mono-synth into a bunch of guitar pedals. I then fed what I created back into the synth for further processing- kind of like a feedback loop. The name comes from the relationship that the moon has with our tides and the invisible pull gravity has on our lives.

Standing Waves

It was when I finished this track that I realised that I had an album on my hands and where I needed to take it. Not that it’s completely obvious but this track was written on my up-right piano and existed as a few chords and melodic ideas that I recorded using bits of metal and tape attached to the strings to make it sound more metallic and percussive. I added a lot of synths to the piano and tried to create a world where the piano was fighting for space with the electronic elements. This track dictated a lot where the sound of the album ended up.

Phantom Lights

I remember my girlfriend went to London for a long weekend which afforded me the opportunity to live how I would if she wasn’t around to keep me 'normal'. This track came out of that weekend working weird hours, not sleeping or washing much, eating weird things sporadically and generally not leaving the house for 4 days. I’m sure it helped add to the tense atmosphere in this track. There is a bit of a John Carpenter vibe in the second half when the synths take over the acoustic elements. I also tried (and failed) to create a synth part as good as the one at the end of "Machine Gun" by Portishead.

Oscillations

This came from an improv session using my live set-up when I should have been rehearsing for a gig. I do this a lot and have built up a lot of material this way. I didn’t plan on using any of these on the album but there is something that stood out with this piece and I kept coming back to it and ultimately it seemed a good interlude in the middle of the record. It’s the only track that was made purely from electronic sound sources on the album- it’s a single take with no overdubs.

The Kraken

There is one track on every album that becomes like climbing Everest – and seems like finishing it is an insurmountable challenge. Not one to give up, I worked on this track for months and months. Somehow it made its way to its finished state. The final section is of a hammered dulcimer part played over a bunch of distorted electronics which pretty much came about as I was running out of ideas and wondered what would happen if I just went crazy on the hammered dulcimer. The outcome works surprisingly well. Much better than I expected it would especially given that I have no real idea how to play a hammered dulcimer.

Surface Tension

This is my favourite track on the record and encapsulates what I was trying to achieve with the record: taking something made in the real world (in this case a recording of some chords at the piano) and then processing it extensively with both digital and analogue equipment to achieve a weird tension between the organic and the electronic. This was one of those tracks that happened quickly during a particularly productive period of music making.

Euclidean Plane

My brother was up for a while recording drums on another project and- despite being mainly a percussionist - he is also a very unusual guitarist in that he has no formal training and doesn’t know any of the traditional chords. I was sure we could get good results from him playing guitar on one of the sketches I had lying around. Despite him not knowing what he was playing, with a bit of guidance and encouragement to use his ears, we layered lots of parts and it really brought this track to life.

Corpseways

Like many of the tracks on the album, this is built around prepared-piano and bowed strings. I kept this one sparse and with very little electronic elements- apart from the distortion which comes in towards the end. This was taken from a rehearsal of my live set where after the last track I pretty much turned all the knobs to 10 (or 11 if you like Spinal Tap). Improvised or spontaneous elements are important to me and I find that when I’m making music, the less aware of what I’m actually doing, the better the outcome is.

Heat & Entropy is out Friday 29 July via Ba Da Bing Records