ADAM CONEY & RICHARD PIKE - Driftingland: For Guitar & Piano Vol. 1
Gilles Deleuze wrote “What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing...the thing that might be worth saying.”
Driftingland is the first collaboration between Adam Coney on guitar and Richard Pike on piano, centring upon a language of deep listening, reverence for sound, restraint and distillation of ideas. At the end of 2021 Pike found himself drifting towards the piano when he befriended Coney. In downtime Pike would film improvisations, as a kind of Friday night constitutional in the colder months, which he would then upload to social media.
This was where Coney asked if he could play along to one of the experiments, which became the first offering you hear, Europe At Dawn. After this piece was recorded remotely in their separate home studios, the duo would meet regularly to record their ‘real-time compositions’ and Driftingland was born.
Driftingland refers to the geographical area of Thanet in Kent, U.K where the artists live, the south-easternmost point of England. An area that was once an island, now a peninsula, and may one day drift into the sea again.
It also refers to the drifting nature of the project, a series of patient and unrushed conversations between two close friends, with little agenda besides listening, exploration of tonality, and the antiphonic nature of two instruments in a room: guitar & piano.
The agenda was clear - to reach a mutual textural and harmonically explorative place, with little effects or post- production, in a time where most recordings go through some degree of electronics and processing. Only the two pure acoustic instruments can be heard, creaks and all, the silence and the air of the room as important as the choice of notes.
These recordings have opened up an ongoing interaction between the two composer/musicians, hence the first collection being titled Volume 1, with the results being impressionistic, sparse, but harmonically unpredictable.
The record is an artefact of two friends and artists creating a new common space together with interaction and patience at the centre of its creation.
Biographies
Adam Coney is a composer/guitarist with a keen sense of production aesthetic and progressive sensibility who draws on improvisation, post rock and jazz vernacular. Stylistically his work has been noted for its idiosyncratic take on pastoral and angular reflections.
Richard Pike is a composer, producer and label curator at the intersections of experimental, ambient, techno, jazz and hybrid orchestral. His work includes TV drama scoring, sound design with United Visual Artists, quiet music with his moniker Deep Learning, and his groups PVT (Warp) and Forgiveness (Gondwana).
