Stories in Slow Light

---

The 2nd Gifts From Crows Album, ‘Stories in Slow Light’ is a collaboration between composer Richard Laurence and photographer Helena Whitten.

Laurence stumbled across Whitten’s work in an issue of Some Such magazine where her haunting, long exposure photographs were being featured. After picking up a copy in an art gallery in Bruton, he found himself returning to the images again and again and eventually reached out to Whitten to ask if she would be open to having them extended through musical composition.

Whitten uses the technique of slow-shutter speed to capture the beauty and fragility of life in unexpected places. In her own words, "When the shutter on a camera is left open, there is the opportunity to capture a substantial segment of time. The action is then trapped in a two-dimensional image and can be viewed in its entirety, in an instant. The shutter rises like the curtain on a stage. A drama is played out and then the curtain falls. In that time, I see an opportunity to tell a story."

It is these very stories that Laurence felt compelled to explore. He found that by sitting at the piano with one of Helena’s photos placed where the sheet music would normally rest, he could literally write music to accompany the scene in front of him, as if the score were hidden inside the image.

The events and figures in Whitten’s work are almost living and breathing, they want to persist in the present and into the future. But the paradox of slow-shutter work is that these figures, with their disappearing arms, legs and heads, inescapably become ethereal and ghostlike, barely there and slipping away.

 Laurence explains further. ‘I find Helena’s photos incredibly emotive. They are simultaneously timeless but also contemporary and speak to so many of the challenges that humanity is facing today – the fragility of the planet, the transience of life, loneliness and mental health. It is all there and these are also the themes that I explore in my music. 

The music itself is a significant departure from the debut album which relied on sample libraries for more or less all of its sound canvas but largely stuck to traditional arrangements. This time round the audio palette has been extended and is as much a crossover into dark ambient electronic music as it is neoclassical.

Disembodied human voices murmur amidst the sound of windup toys and sub-bass whale calls whilst glitch drums drive the tracks forward. The more classical sounds of violins, cellos and violas have much more of an edge this time round, sometimes fed through blues guitar rigs and other unexpected treatments before bleeding their way out of the mix.

The concept of ‘slow light’ is itself an interesting one. We think of light is the fastest thing in the universe but there are ways in which it can be slowed down to the speed of a bicycle or even stopped and restarted again. After watching experiments of this phenomena by Danish physicist Lene Vestergaard, Laurence drew parallels with Whitten’s photography and the album title, ‘Stories in Slow Light’ was coined, perfectly summed up their collaboration.

The first piece to be composed from this process was ‘Beyond the Frame’ and, fittingly, it is the opening track of the album and the first single of the song cycle. It will be released on the 26th of November along with a video created by Timon Mahony.