 This is a wholly different project from any of my other recorded works and is much more eclectic, featuring an almost chamber music sensibility – written largely for Cello, Violin and light percussion, with only 2 pieces of Didjeridu music included, one of them a duet with my cousin Ben Davies on cello – “Melones Part 2”. The recordings were made at Elephant Studios in London, once again with Simon Tassano producing and engineering. Except the final piece of the Choreography, which we tracked and mixed in a small studio in Barcelona under tight and stressful conditions days before “Ocho” premiered in Barcelona at a festival of Modern Dance.
This piece, “Toots” ended up on my anthology CD “Family Tree”. I remember recording it track by track, playing all the instruments myself, as Maria Antonia danced the [NEW] choreography in the recording studio in a space the size of a postage stamp. We mixed in some of the original mournful toots track from the Elephant recordings and ambient sounds of bicycle spokes, crickets, trucks and running water culled from my field recordings around the world, particularly China and Hong Kong. Et voila. “Ocho” the show won various Contemporary Dance Awards in Europe in the following years.
Though very different from all my other works I rate this one as one of the most satisfying. The ‘Elefantes’ bit came in when I included one piece from the follow up project with Maria Antonia, “Marco Raso”, which featured a large polystyrene elephant on the stage, made by sculptor Paul Badger. That piece is more in the realm of jazz, with string bass and a brass section.
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