riverrun

The riverrun project is a series of heavily-composted landscape recordings that I have been working on for nearly two decades in parallel to my songs. In the process of recording, I often become sidetracked by a new sound I have made - some peculiar, unrepeatable combination of instruments and effects - and spend a while exploring the ramifications of it. 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 happens when I try to blend these little fragments together, a painstaking process that involves slowing down tapes, matching key signatures, and looking for interesting contrasts and juxtapositions. 

The name riverrun comes from the famous first sentence of James Joyce's novel Finnegan's 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, has been widely reviewed, and has 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.

Listen

To date, I have released eight riverrun albums: Pentimento, La Mer, New Cartographies, Romer Shoal, Lilliput, and The Same Silent Hill, Avalon Marsh, and Crow Covert. There is a collaboration album between riverrun and William Delano called Southernmost that is very much in the riverrun 'style', and a ten-hour version of the Lilliput album called Lilliput (by Night)

Clicking on the album links will take you to a page where you can listen to each album in full, and in some cases, read more about how they were created.

Pentimento (2010)

Romer Shoal (2016)

Lilliput (by Night) (2019)

Crow Covert (2022)

La Mer (2011)

Lilliput (2018)

The Same Silent Hill (2020)

New Cartographies (2012)

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