Iudicium

I’m happy to announce the release of Iudicium, the new Hands of Ruin single. The story of this release is a long one. Back in 2010, as part of a challenge to myself to write five tracks in five days, I surprised myself by coming up with a track that made use of a palette of sounds that were unusual for me: starting with a base of darbuka samples and a droning sound made from slowing down a vocal sample, I came up with a track with a distinctly middle-eastern feel. I thought at the time that it was a strong track and I was proud of it, but I didn’t have anything else with that sort of sound so I didn’t really know what to do with it.

A few months later, encouraged by the success of this track, I tried to come up with others that made use of the same palette of sounds, but it’s one of the strange things about making music: sometimes I make all the right steps and a track can come together very quickly, but often I struggle for a long time and don’t succeed in coming up with something that I’d be happy for other people to hear.

When I met the artist Malwina Chabocka, we decided that we’d like to collaborate, combining my music with her visuals. While she was in Poland and I was in London I sent her my early version of Iudicium. She responded with some visual ideas, and once we were both together in London we put them together into the video. It was our first attempt at animation, and it took a lot of trial and error to put together. Next time we do something like this — and we do have some more ideas in the pipeline — we’ll do it very differently. Nonetheless, we’re proud of what we achieved.

At some point during the process, we decided to make life a bit easier for ourselves by shortening the track. The original was eight minutes long, but we cut it down to five for the video.

The other two tracks, Sententia and Absolutio, were two of the attempts to replicate the success of Iudicium. I’m happy with them now, but they took a lot more work and a few false starts before I got to the point where I was satisfied. In particular, it was only last summer when I had a bit of time to work on music while on holiday in Poland that I introduced the manipulated vocal samples from a recording of Rachmaninov’s The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom into Sententia that give it the character it has now.

So this release collects both the video and original versions of Iudicium, along with Sententia and Absolutio, plus the video itself. I hope you enjoy it.