Muscle Memory is a new record by composer Tullis Rennie – two recently composed sound pieces made in collaboration with Matthew Bourne and Graham South.
The record is part autobiographic docu-music, part jazz-inspired dreamscape.
Each recording begins on the sofa in the house of a collaborator. Tullis joins Matthew in his idyllic Yorkshire hilltop live-in studio, and Graham in his Manchester red-brick front room. From ‘listening-in’ to chat in these domestic spaces, we then float into abstract realms of electronic textures and improvised musical conversations between each pair.
The compositions demonstrate what any obsessive knows: how many memories can be held within a single moment on one track from one record, and how much influence that can have on identity – both musical and personal.
The pieces act as meta-texts, revealing various layers to the act of listening.
Muscle Memory is Tullis Rennie’s invitation to join him in the act of listening to listening. Listening as an event, an experience – one that is individual and also shared. He invites you, the listener, to consider yourself as a collaborator. To consider music and identity in combination. To consider recordings as autobiographical accounts and collective cultural documentation. To understand music as a performance in which we are all implicated and involved, whether by playing, buying, streaming, dancing, or listening.