Slowdive’s Simon Scott is back with a new release on 12k following his collaboration with Marcus Fischer (Shape Memory) and his full-length Below Sea Level. Apart chronicles the emotions of Simon losing his father and how his environment helped process and heal.

“On 3rd April 2020 my father was pronounced dead from Covid-19. 48 hours after this devastating news I walked through New Decoy, a nature reserve in the Fens, and heard the vocalisation of skylarks. Their songs rang out across the resonant environment, or to use the lexicon of R Murray Schafer, across the ‘soundscape’, as the auditory image created an unexpected multi-species entanglement of sound-meaning correspondence. Self-aware of the decades that had past since visiting the Fens in my childhood in the early 1980’s with my father, the apperception augmented my profound sense of loss.

Helen MacDonald, author of H Is For Hawk, wrote about her experiences of the death of her father, and described how, in moments of deep grieving, she realised one is “clinging to a world already gone” The audition of the skylarks raised multiple temporalities in my consciousness, and connected the bird song to the death of my father through phenomenological turmoil. With urgency to capture this species that is in decline in the UK, and to create an archival audio document before the skylarks disappeared forever, I reached into my backpack and pulled out my portable field recorder and pressed the record button. I also employed underwater recording technology to reveal vibrational phenomena existing outside of commonplace audition.

In the studio I composed a piano piece that weaved around the central field recordings of the Fens which I also treated by electronic means to achieve the sound and emotion I felt.”