Output details

(as Virginia Pipe) 'Tesco Closes' and 'Floorpoon'

I produce music under several authorial personae cast as ‘character brands’. Virginia Pipe is strictly a composing (as opposed to improvising) project. All tracks are meticulously composed using either Bhajis Loops (a now-defunct PDA app) or Albeton Live. It was conceived as a way to combine my experience of non-idiomatic 'free' improvisation with my engagement in post-Disco beats music.

In the summer of 2010, the first Virginia Pipe album Bahnhof zum Bahnhof, which had been available on the Free Music Archive (FMA) for two years, suddenly received sustained exposure at New Jersey's WFMU, with some eight or nine DJs playlisting tracks from it over a period of two months. Downloads for the album have continued steadily ever since – currently at over 20,000, which is huge for the FMA. As a result of the increased interest in Virginia Pipe, I decided to release a follow-up album project comprising a 7” vinyl EP with supplementary rough-cut CD – 20 tracks in total – constituting an episodic essay on anticipation and event which a pop record release so often embodies.

Beat-based, club-derived composition is more literally about practical discourse than any other musical form: each new release must be (and invariably is received as) a critical response to what has just gone before, but with a deeply absorbed knowledge of its prior heritage. In that respect, these tracks are also essays on what is, and has been, current in recent beat music culture.

The music strives to be innovative in its embrace of the musical language of non-idiomatic improvisation, and in illustrating that it is possible to experience a music characterised by rhythmic energy that nonetheless resists regularity or regimentation.