Daniel Land

The riverrun project is a series of heavily composted landscape recordings that I have been working on for nearly two decades alongside my songs. In the process of recording, I often become sidetracked by a new sound I’ve made—some peculiar, unrepeatable combination of instruments and effects—and spend a while exploring its ramifications. These experiments hardly ever end up on a “band” record, but over the course of nearly twenty years I have built up a large library of sounds and textures. The riverrun pieces are what happen when I try to blend these little fragments together, a painstaking process that involves slowing down tapes, matching key signatures, and searching for interesting contrasts and juxtapositions. You can read more about that, along with how the riverrun project basically continues a set of experiements started and then largely abandoned by Brian Eno, in my essay on the subject.

The name riverrun comes from the famous first sentence of James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake, and the music is meant to be as oneiric and mysterious as that novel. The focus here, though, is less literary and more an exploration of geography and memory. The track titles often include direct references to memories, landscapes, times of day, or even certain kinds of light—all bathed in the sepia tones of nostalgia. Perhaps for this reason, the riverrun project was initially something I did for my own amusement only. But as time has gone on, it has attracted a small but dedicated group of listeners, been widely reviewed, and even received praise from the graphic novelist Warren Ellis, who kindly wrote that it was “something foggily comforting for the forebrain”—which is exactly how I would have described it, if I had his talent with words.