William Adamson - Under an East Coast Moon (2013)

William Adamson trudges into view, muddied and dishevelled from his journey across the mist-shrouded, waterlogged heathland of Suffolk, bearing verse imagined and forged “Under An East Coast Moon”.

The slug trails of idea, half-truth and the untold. Catching the light of the full moon, crisscrossing each other on the path. We set about devising a map with places of which we had heard, through some chance visits and low sky directions. A mental map stretched down to Orford in the south, Southwold in the north and inland for twenty miles or so in the county of Suffolk on the east horn of the UK. A man was walking. A dog had been prowling, men readied for an apocalypse. Was the sea telling stories? Old songs and new roads, coughing, standing spitting, while we squinted into one of the hollows of England.

William Adamson – Jan 2013

Brownswood are delighted to announce the release of a new record from Gilles Peterson’s long time cohort Rob Gallagher, the former talisman of acid jazz pioneers Galliano and sporadic poet Earl Zinger. Produced by heritage futurists 2 Banks Of 4, the multi-faceted Gallagher has created a topographical travelogue – a concept album in the truest sense – where the songs tell fragments of stories that have grown out of a small region in the Eastern Horn of England, with sounds more akin to recordings emanating from the Louisiana marshlands. Drawing on the abundant talents of Tom Skinner (drums); Finn Peters (flute); Shawn Lee (guitars); Tom Rodwell (guitars); Tom Herbert (bass); Gil Cang (organ); Valerie Etienne (voices); and Alice Grant (voices), William Adamson’s voyage into deepest East Anglia shares the same musical roots as Tom Waits and Dr. John.
Drawing inspiration from the Suffolk landscape – ancient burial grounds, fortifications against Nazi invaders, sea defences now inadequate against global warming and forests felled by the great storm of 1987 – stories are interwoven and layered with meaning. Cautionary tales of fallen women, folk songs and gothic legends fuse with reflections and refractions from W. G. Sebald’s book The Rings of Saturn, whose themes of the transience of human existence set against the decay and erosion of English coastal life resonate with the album as a whole. It was a chance discovery at the end of a recording session, inspiring the track of the same title.