by Andy Coombs of Soft Cotton County

Music was once ‘the most important, unimportant thing we had,’ said music critic and presenter Robert Elms. This sums up my relationship with writing in general and music in particular. I want to keep it unique and avoid the fillers and the B-sides. One great song would make me happy. In an ocean of mediocrity, sea levels are rising, but starfish are still found in the depths.

Listen to the album while reading the text.

Songs start in my head as phrases and lines — a slow, multi-faceted process for me. Imagination is the driver. The instrument is the interface: the portal from the brain to the corporeal world. The sources of inspiration are multiple and often subconscious or second-hand, from books and films, old notebooks, voice memos, and overheard conversations. The ideas usually arrive half-formed via the ‘cosmic ordering service,’ a kind of ethereal Soundcloud containing all variations on every theme, and that seems to connect most artists once they are in the zone. Sometimes it’s next-day delivery, sometimes next year (As with a well-known earthly mail-order service).

My favorite metaphor for the creative process is planetary formation. The ideas are like planets coalescing from collided rubble, fragments of work. Occasionally, I form a lovely thing, a Jupiter or Saturn, and other times, only jagged rocks in erratic orbits.

In the mid-90s, I moved from the electro-punk of my first synthesizer to soft-textured voices, understated and ethereal — bittersweet flavors. I had some success with these sounds. First, Lorraine Craig’s expert vocal take on the ‘dream pop’ style combined with Ant Glynne (onetime guitarist for brilliant giants such as Mike Oldfield, Rick Wakeman, and Roger Chapman), bringing energy, performance, and technical knowledge to his 8-track tape machine.

A decade later, in 2009, Sascha Panknin, of the successful Hamburg label 5000records, joined the project. The following album that year, consisting of mainly revived, pre-loved, arty demos culled from years of work, made appreciative ripples on the indie scene — popular on North American university radio stations. However, I was still searching for the correct representation for my compositions.

I met Shira Fox in 2014. Shira immediately took to what was, for her, an unfamiliar format – her South African family roots bring a very subtle but significantly different flavor to the archetypal ‘dream pop’ voice. Consequently, working with Sascha and engineer Lee Dallon, we finally nailed the Soft Cotton sound on ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon.’ A title that reflected my admiration for local boy J G Ballard, one of those Bowie influencers who set his novels in the Thames Valley, the vibrant places I knew and frequented from Richmond to Shepperton.

On subsequent recordings, Sascha was now committed (embroiled, some might say!) in the project, having moved, by coincidence, within a mile of me in South-West London. This heralded a marked change in the recording process, bringing German precision engineering (haha), discipline, advanced editing technology, and fine-tuning. There is a significant overlap of influences and a primarily healthy amount of dissonance. My love of Bowie, Dylan, Roxy Music, Eno, Tangerine Dream, Kate Bush, Julee Cruise, and Gabriel… the usual suspects, was evident. Sascha also saw the arty pop of Prefab Sprout, Everything but the Girl, and Trevor Horn, which influenced thinking-person’s productions in my music and contemporary material, similar in style to SCC, which was previously unfamiliar to me.

10 Years of Travel

We launched the new album project’s first salvo – the ‘Blue on Blue’ EP – which received significant airplay on BBC 6 Music and legendary Radio Caroline and appeared in independent playlist charts worldwide.

The project entered a period of slow motion in 2017 when Shira took an opportunity to work overseas and travel in the Far East. Then, the year after she returned, other well-documented (global) interruptions prevented us from working in the same space. But determined to create momentum, Shira recorded some vocals at her place under remote guidance.

I had all the songs in place in terms of composition and basic arrangement, bar one, when I found a box of old lyrics from my school days. They were terrible, of course, but a straightforward line stood out, ‘Tales of far off lands and near, near places….’ That line kept coming back to me whenever I was traveling. Eventually, a matching melodic phrase arrived in my head. This formed the opener for the album, ‘It Could Happen to You’.

In the last year of recording, we switched to working on some of Shira’s vocals at my place. Then, with Sascha fully re-engaged in the production process, we recorded parts in a West London studio.

Although the album precursor, ‘Blue on Blue,’ came out in 2016, the new record, in effect, has taken ten years to complete since that breakthrough 2014 EP, ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon.’ Consequently, ‘10 Years of Travel’ is an accidental reflection of the title I had lined up a long time ago. Originally, it referred to the different times and places the compositions were coming from.

We like to see this record not as rock’n’roll but as a kind of folk music from the future. Sonically, Shira and Sascha have contributed several coats of weatherproof gloss to my melody-driven compositions and introspective primer. The sound that once was just a dream,’ 10 Years of Travel,’ should be the apotheosis of Soft Cotton County. We hope some agree.

Homepage
Bandcamp
Spotify
YouTube
Facebook

Artist’s Note
London, UK
Alternative, Pop, Ambient, Art Pop, Dreampop, Electronic, Indie-Folk, Indie-Pop
journey, collaboration, future