HITD 057 MARTA SALOGNI & TOM RELLEEN ‘Music For Open Spaces’

«Tom and I started recording Music for Open Spaces during our travels to Joshua Tree, just at the edge of the desert. Other tracks were recorded while on a trip to Cornwall. We loaded the car with tape machines, a couple of synths and Tom’s bass. When we arrived we set up a small studio in the living room of a rented house, facing the ocean. The last pieces were made in our familiar places, in London.
All the tracks are mostly spontaneously improvised, influenced and inspired by the landscapes in which we were immersed at the time, those being both physical spaces and metaphysical ones, but always open.
After Tom passed away, I finished this record on my own, carrying both of us in my heart. I have left these compositions unaltered, unmixed. Just as they were the last time we listened to them together. To me, these “open spaces” are where Tom is now, unconstrained by form.
Together with Morgan Cuinet’s collages, conceived as a visual mirroring of each track, the artwork consists of a blue map Tom made and that I have only recently discovered. This internal map, as he called it, is scratched with his fingernails to create pathways. I wanted to include it in the album, feeling it could be used to navigate these “open spaces”. Or just let yourself drift and wander, as you wish».
– Marta Salogni

Music for Open Spaces is more than a collection of eleven masterly composed pieces of experimental music inspired by moving landscapes such as the Joshua Tree desert, the Cornwall coastline or the inward Londoner abode: it is an adventure into a compelling intellectual landscape that involves the listener while opening unexpected perspectives at every step towards a new beginning.
Listening to the tracks induces us to find our own way beyond the consuetudinary geometries through which we decipher our interaction with the ambient, offering us the chance of a true discipline of perception.

All tracks written, performed and produced by Marta Salogni and Tom Relleen.
Recorded at Stella’s Studios in Joshua Tree, Cornwall and London
Mixing by Marta Salogni at Studio Zona, London
Mastered by Heba Kadry, NYC
Cutting by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios, London
Artwork: collages by Morgan Cuinet; Internal Map by Tom Relleen
Layout by Romain Barbot