Sad Cow / UK / 2020 / CS
“'Moulin débris’ was composed on a volunteering trip in Monthiers, France in summer 2017, ‘Dan Y Derw’ (a kind of afterthought of the first piece) was composed in Glandwr, Wales in spring 2018, and ‘Room 002’ was composed in my first-year university room. All of the pieces were worked on a nylon-string acoustic, hence the more central place it occupies in arrangements, but I was also beginning to want to incorporate more unusual timbres. Rhys Copeland again did the mastering, and a spontaneous drawing was provided for artwork by George Storm Fletcher, who also played the cymbals on the third track.”
Luke Cowan is a musician and producer based in London. He grew up in Ely, Cambridgeshire, and his work is deeply imbued with the geography and atmosphere of the fenland landscape surrounding it. Utilising a combination of piano, nylon-string guitar, harmonium and dulcimer, his music is then woven with the sounds of pinecones (plucked or bowed), spoons hung from trees in his garden, bowed steel discuss, or even a handful of lentils. This approach to arrangement, combined with a vérité approach to production, gives his music an undeniable pastoral quality, as well as a certain vitality. In his music, Luke seeks to strike some form of balance between the preconceived and the purposefully placed, as well as the utterly spontaneous.