Group Listening + Special Guests Billets

Musical collaborators for the past decade, Paul Jones and Stephen Black are together  known as the woodwind-and-key-wielding, sculptural-papier-mâché-hat-wearing Group  Listening. 

Following renegade reinterpretation records Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1 (2018)  and Vol. 2 (2022), which pulled apart, pondered, and re-shaped cult ambient classics by  the likes of Robert Wyatt, Arthur Russell and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Walks (2024) — a  shining modernist monolith buried deep in the woods — is their first volume of completely  original compositions.  

Walks draws from the field recordings of Ernest Hood; the abstraction of Harold Budd; the  saxophone of Sam Gendel; the “heightened naturalism” of a Martin Parr photograph; the clarity and site-specificity of Japanese ambient, environmental & new age music of the  80s and 90s, and, prominently, Robert Walser’s pseudo-biographical novella The Walk — an appreciation of the philosophical space gifted by walks to walkers.  

An ode to the gently psychedelic potential of wandering around in some place, any place,  every place: the places in one’s own mind, Walks invites you to listen and think; to slip through the fabric of time a little or a lot, depending on how long you’ve got. Over all, to paraphrase Walser, it invites you to glow and flower yourself in the glowing, flowering  present.   

 

"Exquisite neo-classical work"  Electronic Sound Review

“Supremely serene” Uncut

"Hazy, bright and sleepy - a dreamtime soundscape"  Elizabeth Alker, BBC R3

“Supremely serene” Uncut

See more about the artists Here

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