A Pulse Passes from Hand to Hand

A Pulse Passes is the first collaborative recording between Martin and Young. This project was dreamt up while Martin was on tour with Young's project Sontag Shogun in April 2014, as a meeting place between the lush ambient layerings of cello, guitar and tape-collage textures, and conceived in the months to follow. Each piece begins with a tape-loop cut from short piano compositions by Young, and is then augmented brick by brick in fluid, stream-of-consciousness instrumental improvisations. The four repeating tape splices never quite retreat too far from the foreground, and as the textures become more and more lush, the loops seem to change their definition, adapting endlessly to the sonics around them. Minimal electronic treatment serves only as a binding element here, yet it is the raw and untampered integrity of the instrumentals that sits at the core of this collaboration.
These four works are true meditations on a theme, laid down onto and anchored by the tape. Let this album pass over you like cirrus clouds on their way inland, or underneath you like a woodland stream.


We first met on tour, where, each night, the music we created was passed to small crowds of people and to each other. The title of this album, in part, references the temporary emotional space that live music inhabits and its effect on the bodies occupying that space. "A Pulse Passes..." is not a live album, however, and the title also reflects the idea of creating an album in two separate places, without actually interacting in person, where music is brought to life by being passed back and forth. A third layer of meaning for the title exists in the role of the listener: when the element of creation has come to an end, the final work exists as a document of those moments, a captured pulse passed on to all who listen.