Simon Pomery is self-taught in piano since the age of 5. Born in Ireland and based in Fish Island, he founded Blood Music in a cold water sublet in Newington Green, around 2010. Skin String Sine is his first album release under his own name. It is a life reset.
Written and recorded first at BMS, with further figures written and recorded when Pomery was Halldorophone-Composer-in-Residence at EMS, Stockholm, it signals a new dimension in Simon Pomery’s work, beginning in 2022: being receptive to sound as it appears for the first time and cultivates a suspended state of wonder in player and listener. After playing one iteration of ‘A String Stretched Between Stars and We Pluck It‘ at KET, Athens, audience members approached Pomery while touching their chests and speaking about the effects of the sounds on their hearts. This performance signalled Pomery’s shift from ‘Blood Music’, to his new ‘Heart Music’, which explores the effects of harmonics on the listener.
Skin String Sine is an album made of ‘figures’, a word Pomery now uses to describe the repetition and variation of musical parts, melodies heard in dreams or in waking life, and the body’s manifestation of them. ‘A String Stretched Between Stars and We Pluck It‘ was written for strings and voices in 2022, so that each iteration might have different instrumentation. For Pomery, the ‘figure’ is an earworm, hook, riff, sound transformed into choreography or sculpture, a portable ritual, mimicry, like the crane dance of the Dorians. A longer piece can be built from several figures. When he played ‘A String Stretched Between Stars and We Pluck It’ at Cafe Oto, there were 11 figures played. It’s muscle/body memory.
The name ‘A String Stretched Between Stars and We Pluck It’ has origins in a poem Pomery wrote called ‘To an Innocent Prisoner’, written during the UK/USA aggressions against Middle Eastern peoples in the years 2003-2010. From here the name develops through two anti-fascist poets, Sean Bonney’s translation of Katerina Gogou in Our Death: “I love my friends/ they are wires stretched from city to city”. Then Bonney himself: “We argue endlessly about whether it was us who died or them, but the one thing we all agree on is the barbed line that separates us. Sometimes we pluck that line”. So, the ‘string’ has multiple connections. The OG ‘A String Stretched…’ was titled ‘RAVE BANGER’. It still is that, in a sense: in the sense of suspended melodic sequences made to induce ecstasy, Side A is as much techno, only techno where the pianos are the drums, as much as 88 tuned drums are what we classify as a piano. Indeed, Pomery made ‘A String Stretched Between Stars and We Pluck It’ specifically to be played on club sound systems. He suggests the following listening environments: Fortuna Club (Sougia), Lycabettus Theatre (Athens),
The name ‘In Dawnlight Firstafter Storm’ is one translation of his partner’s name. The name ‘the Figures Emerge, O Generator’ is a development of figures.
String String Sine is written in varied tuning systems: Side A is a blend of an Iwato and Locrian, then played with Ligetian chords, while Side B is Iwato-Legetian plus a just intonation scale for gutted piano and Halldorophone.
Skin String Sine is a bit Joyce’s duodene of bird notes, only rather than 12 Pomery plays 16. “One thinks all of it as is tuning when you tune yourself to a star when in attunement to oneself, when one is attuned to the other to your other”.
Skin String Sine is early music in the way that the constellations are early music.
Skin String Sine, like a spell, or a prayer, or a method for attempting to programme your own future.
Skin String Sine, like praying to Sun Ra.
Skin String Sine is music for space.
Listen in stereo and at different spaces of the room.
