Willowbank Music
Michael Lawrence
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Four 'concept' albums made between 2007 and 2010.
To read about them (and me) scroll down, or click the covers
to go to their individual pages, where you'll be able to hear their music.
My dad was a professional musician who, for most of his working life, made his living playing in dance bands and a certain popular orchestra, though his great love was for big band music. My mother played classical pieces and popular songs on the piano. My own musical taste as I careered through my teens was for Rock 'n' Roll, Blues, Gospel and Skiffle. However, in spite of the odd appearance fronting a band, cutting a disc in a London recording studio, and attending the same art school as Freddie Mercury, Ronnie Wood and Pete Townshend, I had no ambition to be involved in the production or performance of any kind of music. It wasn't until the mid-1970s, when I fell in with a singer-songwriter who performed in clubs and pubs in Southern England, that I began writing lyrics, for which he wrote melodies. Between us we produced a couple of dozen songs. When I moved out of the area our partnership ended, but by then I was writing music as well as lyrics, which I continued to do for some time, calling upon musician acquaintances to support my shaky vocals when I wanted to commit a song to tape. When I ran out of accompanists in the 1980s I stopped writing songs. And time passed.
Time in which I did several other things, including writing and publishing a great many books and stories for children and teenagers, until I eventually returned to the making of music, this time by way of technology that wasn't around when I wrote my first songs - experiments in which I used anything that came to hand to create the tracks that can be heard on these four albums: musical instruments of course, but also melodic phrases, loops and samples scavenged and reshaped to achieve specific sounds, plus some aural effects of my own making, and - on the 'Universe' album - unearthly sounds from outer space collated by NASA and others.
If you're fond of music to hum along with or which lulls you in some pleasant way, you'll not find it here. When I write a song I fashion a tune for it, obviously, but for compilations like this anything goes. Numerous labels are tossed in the air for such music - 'alternative', 'modernist', 'contemporary classical', 'ambient, 'electronic', 'atonal', 'minimalist', even 'post-minimalist', whatever the hell that is. I have never played these albums to anyone. As with some books that I've spent years writing but for which I have no publishing plans, I created them for an audience of one: myself. If you listen to - or start to listen to - any of the tracks and find yourself muttering something like 'And that's the audience this deserves,' it's quite understandable. There's no reason why you should like something just because I do, or because I made it.
