Programme Notes
When approaching this composition, I wanted to use the unique relationship between the tape and piano to explore and develop from each other. As the title suggests I took inspiration from walks specifically in winter and in a busy or even anxious headspace. Such a busy racing of thoughts juxtaposed with quiet winter scenery is an interesting relationship that tape and solo captures effectively. The tape is affected by what happens in the piano and spirals ideas and sonic aspects of the solo part into its electronic part with varying degrees distance from the original sounds and with additional uniquely electronic sounds arising. Just as the walker can disturb the peace of the winter landscape and the winter landscape can either calm or give rise to racing thoughts, and I have tried to capture this with varying swells of sound, levels of panning, and levels effects to capture different levels distorted reflections of solo part within the tape. A combination of chords, hammer sounds, trills, melodies and unusual guitar string sounds serve as the source for the tape. With various effects such as granulations, equalization, delay, reverb, pitch modulators and others to transform these sounds. In order to capture the effect of natural responses and reflections of each other between the tape and solo parts this piece is be played very rhythmically expressively with lots of rubato.