Track By Tracks: The River - A Hollow Full Of Hope (2023)

1. Fading:

Fading was initially meant to be a song that started as a single clean guitar before building up to a wall of noise by the end. During the initial recording, we realized that wasn’t going to work. The melodies were tripping over themselves & we were finding it hard to keep the song distinct under a wall of noise that was becoming unnecessarily dense & suffocating. We had an hour’s worth of studio time left on the day of recording & we made the decision, with that little time left, to strip it back & record it acoustically. The only remainder of the original recording we left in is the initial clean guitar track, which we reversed & left playing throughout. It definitely has an air of spontaneity to it: the mics were arranged in the room quite quickly, leaving us no time to adjust any that may have been slightly out of place, & consequentially, if you listen carefully, you can hear the noise of the room, our breathing & shuffling around, as clearly as the song. There’s also the squeak of the upright piano pedal over the end play out. We probably could have found the time & money to rerecord the song ‘properly’, or painstakingly remove every noise & blemish, but we liked the vibe & organic feel of this recording.

2. Exits:

Exits took about five minutes to come up with, it takes longer to play than it did to write. It wasn’t without some minor strife though. Having already recorded the drum tracks we had to lose half a day that was set aside for guitars rerecording drums, as we’d tweaked the verses since the initial session. There’s a lot of additional percussion over the end that blends in with the acoustic guitar; shakers, cabasas, Koshi chimes, and the like. It gives the music more flow, dare I say groove, & helps everything breathe more. The chiming notes over the top are played on a HAPI drum, tuned to D-Akebono.

3. Tiny Ticking Clocks:

Tiny Ticking Clocks was initially going to have an accordion played all the way through it. We wanted a drone accompaniment to the chords, because they’re so sparse, and thought the accordion would make a nice juxtaposition. Whilst I was recording the guitars, I noticed a Rhodes tucked behind one of the studio doors & we decided that would be a better instrument to use. It completely changed the feel of the song, giving it a sort of 4AD/Twin Peaks-vibe.

4. A Vignette:

A Vignette is similar to Exits in as much as it initially came together very quickly, but we then rearranged the middle & had to rerecord the drums again. We wanted the extra instrumentation at the end to sound like a music box accompaniment or have a fairground/carnival sort of feel, but we couldn’t quite get the correct sounds. In the end, we settled on a glockenspiel and mellotron.

5. Hollowful:

Hollowful is an instrumental piece that only has three parts & a handful of chords to it. The violin & the piano do all the heavy lifting. The piano parts are quite broken and loose: this is because we recorded Jenny trying to figure out what to play & what came out in the process worked perfectly well on its own terms. We decided to leave those parts as they are, rather than contriving to find something more rigid, simply because they captured the mood. Interestingly, there’s no such word as ‘hollowful’ in the dictionary. By definition, something hollow should be full of hollowness, much like rueful means being full of regrets or hopeful means being full of optimism, but it appears there are no words to convey that someone or something is full of nothing. I did find a reference to something being hollow in a nineteenth-century book regarding countryside walks & rambles, but the passage in question was in reference to how many hollows, potholes as they’re known now, there were along a particular stretch of road.