The story behind Mark Edwards' exhilaratingly beautiful debut album, Balance, is as unusual as the record itself. Ten instrumental pieces, lovingly assembled in an almost beat-free style which aligns glassy guitar figures with minimalist keyboard elegance, Balance is a record born out of a private passion.
After a lifetime spent immersed in music, as a journalist, composer and multi instrumentalist, Edwards had pretty much decided against going public with his tunes. Having witnessed and reported the travails of bands and artists struggling to make sense of the music industry, he was perfectly happy beavering away on the sidelines. Occasionally working with the viola player James Topham – the former assistant to Brian Eno whom he met while helping out with the Warchild charity project - Edwards was having a whale of time in his home studio. “I regarded making music as fun,” he says. “ I felt that if it became work then it wouldn’t be fun any more.”
As is often the way with juicy secrets, news of what Edwards was getting up to on his 4 track recorder leaked out. Somebody played something to somebody else, and before Edwards knew it his track There Is No Hope In Perfection got aired on national radio. “That sense that people were listening was unexpectedly exciting,” he confesses. More conversations followed with various interested parties and in due course a deal was struck with a new label, Spokes.
The music on Balance was all written and recorded between 2003 and 2007 in Edwards’ north London home. Influence spotters may discern a touch of Eno at his most ambient, a sprinkling of Dave ‘Aerial M’ Pajo’s layered guitars and, in its more upbeat synth-y moments, an echo of Air. The ghost of the American minimalist composer Harold Budd is probably rattling around somewhere in there as well. And in case this is all starting to sound a bit arch and art, Oasis are a key reference point in the final track, Noel Gallagher Lives His Dream, a track Edwards describes as “featuring exactly the kind of chord sequence that Noel Gallagher likes to use for Oasis choruses. So it’s just like Oasis minus the singer…and the drums…and the bass…and the rock guitars.”
Everything you hear was actually played, on real instruments – and one drum machine - in real time. “I don’t like working with computers,” Edwards states firmly. “I can’t work with pro-Tools, sampling or sequencing, because once I go down that road all I ever do is add things and nothing gets finished.”
As this last observation implies, Edwards is very much a musician of the “less is more” persuasion. The opening track When The Space Unfolds alludes, via a Bob Dylan quote, to the importance Edwards attaches to the space between the notes. “For me, making and recording music is a reductive process. Quite a few of these tracks started out with a hip-hop beat which I later mixed out when I realised that it was only providing the scaffolding for the tune.”
And so to the final question, what to call this remarkable, unclassifiable stuff? Post-rock plus, or electronica with a big guitar heart may have to do for now. Edwards himself isn’t too fussed “as long as people don’t think that it’s difficult just because it doesn’t have words. This is friendly music. It wants to talk to you.”
www.markedwardstunes.com
www.myspace.com/markedwardstunes
The jazz festival album on this page is by a different Mark Edwards.
After a lifetime spent immersed in music, as a journalist, composer and multi instrumentalist, Edwards had pretty much decided against going public with his tunes. Having witnessed and reported the travails of bands and artists struggling to make sense of the music industry, he was perfectly happy beavering away on the sidelines. Occasionally working with the viola player James Topham – the former assistant to Brian Eno whom he met while helping out with the Warchild charity project - Edwards was having a whale of time in his home studio. “I regarded making music as fun,” he says. “ I felt that if it became work then it wouldn’t be fun any more.”
As is often the way with juicy secrets, news of what Edwards was getting up to on his 4 track recorder leaked out. Somebody played something to somebody else, and before Edwards knew it his track There Is No Hope In Perfection got aired on national radio. “That sense that people were listening was unexpectedly exciting,” he confesses. More conversations followed with various interested parties and in due course a deal was struck with a new label, Spokes.
The music on Balance was all written and recorded between 2003 and 2007 in Edwards’ north London home. Influence spotters may discern a touch of Eno at his most ambient, a sprinkling of Dave ‘Aerial M’ Pajo’s layered guitars and, in its more upbeat synth-y moments, an echo of Air. The ghost of the American minimalist composer Harold Budd is probably rattling around somewhere in there as well. And in case this is all starting to sound a bit arch and art, Oasis are a key reference point in the final track, Noel Gallagher Lives His Dream, a track Edwards describes as “featuring exactly the kind of chord sequence that Noel Gallagher likes to use for Oasis choruses. So it’s just like Oasis minus the singer…and the drums…and the bass…and the rock guitars.”
Everything you hear was actually played, on real instruments – and one drum machine - in real time. “I don’t like working with computers,” Edwards states firmly. “I can’t work with pro-Tools, sampling or sequencing, because once I go down that road all I ever do is add things and nothing gets finished.”
As this last observation implies, Edwards is very much a musician of the “less is more” persuasion. The opening track When The Space Unfolds alludes, via a Bob Dylan quote, to the importance Edwards attaches to the space between the notes. “For me, making and recording music is a reductive process. Quite a few of these tracks started out with a hip-hop beat which I later mixed out when I realised that it was only providing the scaffolding for the tune.”
And so to the final question, what to call this remarkable, unclassifiable stuff? Post-rock plus, or electronica with a big guitar heart may have to do for now. Edwards himself isn’t too fussed “as long as people don’t think that it’s difficult just because it doesn’t have words. This is friendly music. It wants to talk to you.”
www.markedwardstunes.com
www.myspace.com/markedwardstunes
The jazz festival album on this page is by a different Mark Edwards.
Ambient Chillout Post-rock Mellow