A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time
New album of music for water-powered historical instruments and live instrumentalists
In 2021, I was delighted to be awarded the PRS Foundation and Jerwood Arts Composers’ Fund award to design and build new water-powered musical instruments for an album released on the Birmingham Record Co. label, an imprint of NMC Recordings.
Collaborating with the instrument-maker Sam Underwood, I designed and built three water-powered musical instruments: a harpsichord, hurdy-gurdy, and hydraulis (or water organ). Powered by the river, the instruments produce sound mechanically. Water-wheels turn to ‘play’ the harpsichord and hurdy-gurdy, while the water organ is sounded as water displaces air within the instrument (a system based on an Ancient Greek design).
Additional support from Arts Council England and The Marchus Trust allowed me to record and film these instruments in the historic Rivelin Valley in Sheffield. Once a thriving hub of water-powered industry, the river is now home to the archaeological remains of watermills and mill dams dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Each of the album’s ten tracks was recorded at the site of a former mill. For the recordings, I performed alongside the mechanical instruments (playing a Medieval stringed instrument, the rebec, and the lap steel guitar) as did musicians Rebecca Lee (bass viol) and Rob Bentall (nyckelharpa).
Combining mechanically-produced historical-informed music, film, field-recoding, and live performance, A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time explores ideas of heritage, place, and our changing relationship with the landscape. Ultimately, I hope that the work offers a moment of connection with the river, and with ‘nature’ more broadly. As the American sound-artist Annea Lockwood wrote, “listening to the river and re-experiencing the river’s flow can bring it into your being and remind you of its nature and its being. So next time you hear about a river in trouble you might want to help out.”
A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time is available as a CD, download, and on streaming from NMC Recordings.
You can watch the film that we made to accompany the album, below.
Press
“best science-inflected music albums of 2023… highly original… delicate, captivating” - Tim Boddy New Scientist
“a very subtle and time slowing album – I mean that in the best sense. This is music that really sings of the Rivelin as it is today… working in the very noble tradition of attentive, slow burn river compositions… I found that quiet sense of acknowledgement and repurposing [of the river] in the project really moving, actually, and the sounds of the instruments have a pleasing, woozy twang and tug about them” - Kate Molleson, BBC Radio 3 New Music Show
“The album collects lulling compositions which feel more about continuity than eventfulness, a series of texturally rich drift states at odds with the constant stream of the river that underbeds them…. Tassie’s compositions unearth hidden eddies and currents in the river. As if the instruments are plotting the paths of different energies and trajectories beneath what, on the surface, seems linear and homogenous. What’s superficially constant becomes multifaceted, layered and filled with nuance when transmuted into sound.” - Daryl Worthington The Quietus
“There is a hypnotic quality, meditative about the repetition that is not quite repetition, a sense of variation within a natural flow... combining water-powered and musician-made sounds to completely intriguing effect, highly multi-layered yet feeling as if arising out of the landscape… There is something wonderfully poetic about this disc, along with a craziness that asks for it to be taken on completely its own terms. You have to listen with ears attuned to a different rhythm, but if you do then the results have a kind of magic.” - Robert Hugill Planet Hugill
“composer Benjamin Tassie… wants to give the river its voice back. Working with instrument maker Sam Underwood, he’s designed and built a set of instruments that are actually played by the Rivelin itself… the project aims to reconnect us with the living world.” - Sam Gregory Now Then Magazine
Interview with Where the Leaves Fall
“A fascinating new record… get a bit of morning meditation with Tassie’s natural wonder” - Andy Raven Sings the Blues