LIBTAASN

Rosario

In early September 2026, I spent several days at Rosario, a former convent in Bever, Belgium, around half an hour outside Brussels. I was there to record Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Paul Lytton. We would spend our days in the chapel, often starting straight after breakfast and continuing until our evening meal. There was a lot to say in those sessions, and Paul, Barry and Evan wasted no time in laying down their sonic journeys. It honestly felt like every time we hit record, something remarkable would happen.

In the evenings, after dinner, I would return to the chapel and sit at the piano. The natural light would be fading, the room now vacant, and I would begin playing, often continuing into the night. Those evenings eventually became a record of their own, although it took coming home and spending some time away from the recordings before I began to understand what I had made.

Looking back, the journey into that work began before I reached Rosario.

Leaving

Before we left, I had been experiencing multiple intensities around work commitments and personal challenges. My world had become particularly noisy in a way that was difficult to step outside of. The prospect of abandoning everything for a week felt almost irresponsible. I couldn’t see how going away would help me regain any stability in what I was leaving behind. It hadn’t occurred to me that this might become something more than another job on my plate.

Evan arrived at my home in Ramsgate early on the morning we were due to leave. We were going to have a quick coffee, load the car and head towards Folkestone for a late morning Channel crossing. Seeing Evan always feels a bit like being a kid seeing your best friend. There is that excitement about the discussions we might have, the laughs, the adventures.

Once we got into the car, something began to shift. The conditions of my everyday life ceased to be actionable. I couldn’t answer every email or resolve every problem. I had told myself and the people around me that I was going away to make a record and would be largely unreachable; now I had to honour that decision. I immediately took some strange comfort in certain parts of me becoming unreachable, even to me.

There was something powerful in the physical distance too. Crossing the Channel, entering another country, travelling onwards into rural Belgium. By the time we arrived at Rosario, I felt as though I had been given a blank surface. Perhaps not an empty one, but somewhere I could work without continuously attending to everything beyond it.

Taking up residence

Rosario is an expansive and unusually peaceful place. Alongside the chapel are bedrooms, communal spaces, a library, a large kitchen and dining room, and gardens that seem to extend the feeling of retreat beyond the building itself. We had taken up residence there, working, eating and living within the same environment. The days had a rhythm of their own, with very little interruption from the world outside.

I had worked with Evan before, but I had never met Barry or Paul. Seeing these old friends come together was deeply inspirational. There was so much history between them, and I could hear something of that in how seamlessly they connected, while the music itself kept moving into the unknown.

Others joined us during the residency to observe the sessions and spend time around the work. Their presence was quietly significant. There is a particular energy created by people who choose to witness a recording: bodies sharing a room, listening without needing to intervene, attending to that fragile moment in which music takes form. Their curiosity and concentration became part of the space too.

My days were spent listening closely, following the performances while making the decisions needed to capture them. By the time we stopped for dinner, I had been immersed in their music for hours. Yet I would find myself wanting to go back into the chapel.

There was still somewhere I wanted to go.

Finding a way in

Rosario is a place for performance, recording and artistic residencies, but it is not a conventional recording studio. Everything we needed to document the sessions had to be transported there. What the building offered was a character of its own, one we would have to listen to and work with.

The chapel has a high arched ceiling, a mezzanine at the rear and a domed area at the opposite end, framed by three large windows. The acoustics reminded me of Arco Barco before we began building within it: highly reflective and immediately alive, though a little less unpredictable. There was a beautiful blend between the high and low frequency responses that gave the room a warm, embracing quality. It is difficult to describe, but it felt like every sound we made belonged in there.

I also sensed another kind of resonance. I have long felt that spaces retain something of the actions that have taken place within them. Music, work, worship, whatever focus people have brought into a room. Honestly, I sometimes think I’m imagining it. But when I begin creating somewhere, that is often when I feel it most, through what comes out.

At Arco Barco, after years of work and exchanges with the space, it can feel as though traces of the energy that fuelled earlier creations remain in circulation. Rosario gave me a similar sensation. There was something there I felt I could draw from, even if I couldn’t explain exactly what it was.

In the chapel stood a full-size Baldwin grand piano, apparently one of only two of its kind in Belgium. It was an extraordinary instrument. My first response was to feel intimidated by it.

I am comfortable at the piano and improvise often. I look for energy, for a route into something I cannot explain in advance. Sometimes I find structures or gestures that feel particular to that moment, and I follow them until they begin to reveal something. But sitting at the Baldwin, I suddenly felt unqualified to touch it.

I was acutely aware that other people might hear me searching. Perhaps it was being in the presence of such remarkable musicians, masters of their craft. Perhaps it was the thought of them hearing me explore before I had any idea where I was going. I don’t really know. The first hour was difficult.

Eventually, I played a single note.

I continued playing it, changing the weight, spacing and attack, resisting the temptation to move elsewhere on the keyboard. At first, it felt faintly absurd. But as I stayed with it, the note began to reveal paths. I could hear it leave the piano, activate the architecture and return changed. There was so much happening within that seemingly small gesture.

My attention began to move away from myself and towards the relationship between the instrument and the chapel. I was finding out how the room responded, but also whether I could let go within it. Whether I could stop carrying an expectation of what I ought to be doing and listen to what was already happening.

Eventually, the piano became something that could meet me.

Working into the night

Once that connection appeared, I wanted to record it without breaking it. I was engineering my own sessions, repeatedly moving between technical and creative states of mind. There was nobody waiting at the controls to press record.

I remember assembling the first setup quickly, almost frantically. I could feel something beginning to emerge in my focus and emotional energy, and I desperately didn’t want to lose it. Every decision about a microphone or a level took some of my attention away from where I was moving on the piano.

Headphones would have helped me hear what was happening in the recording, but I was reluctant to acoustically disconnect from the chapel. I wanted to remain inside the sound as I played. That relationship with the room was becoming essential to finding my way.

As the evenings continued, I entered states that felt meditative and, at times, almost hypnotic. There is a space somewhere between me and the piano that I sometimes reach when I improvise. It is difficult to speak about without making it sound more understandable than it is. It feels almost spiritual, magical even. Neither word quite gets there.

When it happens, I find myself travelling emotionally and conceptually into places I couldn’t have predicted. What I play changes what I feel, and what I feel changes where the playing goes. There is a kind of loop in that, one that can become completely absorbing. I love that feeling.

The pressures I had brought with me were no longer at the front of my mind. I wasn’t sitting at the piano trying to describe them. My attention was with the instrument, the chapel and whatever was unfolding. Those other things seemed to have gone somewhere deeper.

Occasionally, in my trance like state, I would imagine Evan looking through the door while I was playing. I would imagine him looking in on me absorbed in the piano and offering a small, approving smile. Maybe he did, but regardless, such a simple gesture, even imagined, gave me an enormous sense of permission. I could stay where I was, without needing to explain it.

The music I was making was separate from the sessions I had been recording during the day, but I couldn’t claim that one experience didn’t enter the other. I arrived at the piano carrying something of Evan, Barry and Paul’s energy with me. Their concentration, their responsiveness, the relationship they had been building with that same space. It was all part of the context in which those evenings happened.

Hearing what was there

Back at home, I left the recordings alone for around two weeks.

When I eventually returned to them, I began to hear connections I hadn’t consciously placed there. Certain structures, repetitions and changes of intensity seemed to correspond with experiences and feelings that had been difficult to articulate. I had been so absorbed in playing that I hadn’t understood those relationships at the time. Listening afterwards gave me another way into what had happened.

It also brought me back into the chapel, though from positions I could never have occupied while sitting at the piano.

I had microphones close to the instrument and others further away in the room. As I listened through them and began mixing, I became increasingly interested in how different the same performance could feel from each position. Moving from microphone to microphone became a way of exploring that.

In one or two pieces, those shifts are quite pronounced. You might be very close to the piano, then suddenly listening from a distant part of the chapel. At other times I bring those perspectives together, allowing the close sound and the room to occupy the recording at once. I still find it fascinating how much our experience of a performance can change simply through where we listen from.

I can’t say that this recreates what I experienced while playing. At the piano, I was in one position, physically involved in making the sound. Back at home, I could move between these other perspectives and discover things I hadn’t heard from the keyboard. The chapel became audible in different ways, with the piano giving shape to its dimensions and response.

I began to enjoy moving through the recordings like that. There was another kind of discovery happening now.

The sound meeting tape

Some of the microphones had been pushed into distortion during the performances. Listening back, I found myself increasingly drawn to those moments. I liked hearing an acoustic instrument become so overpowering that it seemed physically dominant over the microphones capturing it. There was something exciting about the sound reaching beyond what the recording could comfortably contain.

I wanted to spend more time with that quality.

After mixing, I began putting some of the recordings back through open reel tape machines. At least two pieces on the record have been reamped this way, with different degrees of saturation. One was driven particularly hot.

In that piece, the playing becomes quieter while the gain remains where it is. You can hear the change in the performance itself. Then, when everything becomes intense again, the piano pushes hard into the tape. The notes are being thrown around the chapel, and now the recording seems to gather that force into this immense, distorted wall of sound. I really loved what happened there.

Other recordings went through tape more gently. Sometimes I had already been moving between microphones in the mix, and putting that mix through the machine brought another quality to the changing perspectives. I became interested in what the format did to the sound of the piano and to the sound of the room around it.

There was a synergy I hadn’t anticipated. At Rosario, I had been finding this elusive space between myself and the instrument. The microphones had captured different perspectives on whatever happened there. Now the tape was responding to those recordings in a way that felt connected to the energy of the playing.

I couldn’t have planned that relationship while I was in the chapel. It revealed itself through listening and trying things afterwards. I followed it because it felt right, because it drew me further into the performances.

Finding the record

For a while, I had imagined the Rosario material becoming the source for a substantially manipulated electronic work. My live practice often involves returning to earlier improvisations, finding and resampling fragments in real time, building another instrument from something I have already played. I thought I might take these recordings on that kind of journey.

But as I spent time with them, I wanted to stay close to the piano.

There were many hours of playing, and within them I began finding moments I wanted to return to. Some seemed to have a beginning and an end, a sense of having travelled somewhere, although I hadn’t been thinking about making individual pieces at the time. I listened for those moments and allowed them to shape the record.

The mixing grew around them. Moving between microphones, bringing distant and close perspectives together, hearing what happened when the sound met tape. Throughout that process, I wanted to remain faithful to the performances. Even at its most saturated, I wanted to hear the force of that piano, in that room, being played in that particular moment.

The finished work comprises five pieces and will be released on vinyl and CD.

When I think back to leaving Ramsgate, I remember how difficult it felt to step away. I had no idea that, after spending each day recording Evan, Barry and Paul, I would find myself returning to the chapel to make this music. Or that weeks later, at home, I would still be finding my way through those evenings, hearing something from a distant microphone, pushing a recording into tape, recognising a passage as a piece.

I know what the record is now, but there are things inside it that I still find difficult to explain. I can hear myself searching, and sometimes I can hear the moment when I stop being quite so aware of the search. Those are the moments I kept coming back to. They are what made me want to share it.