On Land is a MOOD.

 I've been listening to Ambient Four: On Land by Brian Eno a lot recently. I've also been listening to Spirit of Eden/ Laughing Stock by Talk Talk and Spoils by Alasdair Roberts as well, but mainly On Land. I started listening to it as I was writing the screen-play for Merrow and I wanted it's strangeness to impregnate the world I was creating. I also wanted it as a note for the composer of Merrow's score, because Merrow is going to have a proper score. You cannot imagine the shit-eating grin on my face as I'm writing that. This film is going to look and sound magnificent. 

One of Simon Bray's photographic responses to On Land. 

On Land is a strange, compulsive record. Is it music? It's not made of music. There are very few verifiable instruments on it - deep bass looms out of the mist, there are occasional twinkling synth lines. But most of the noises creak and chime and keen and bubble. It's subterranean. It's deep, black water. It's something brushing against your cheek. This record has surface noise, it's cracked and smeared, bobbled. And it has below the surface noise too. Birds appear, cows low, drones rumble in the bowels of the earth, cave walls drip. All of it echoes. What is happening here? You can't see your hand in front of your face, but you're vividly aware of everything. Primary sensory information is occluded, but you feel this landscape: the pricking of the hair on the nape of your neck, tightening your throat, tingling the base of your spine. Cold sweat on the coccyx. 

What is that? Is that a voice? Some sort of wind instrument? Was that a sharp intake of breath? The sound of something snapping at you in the darkness?     

I don't know the names of any of these songs, and they are not songs in the sense that a stunted bonehead like Noel Gallagher would recognise. There is little by way of a saucy, sing-along chorus here. But what it is, as I believe the young people would have it, is a mood. I listen to it all of a piece, it washes over me. For a record called On Land, it's right at the point of intersection between land and sea. It's cold and clammy, hissing and tidal. It puts you in another place. 

And that's where I want to be for Merrow: an interaction between two states, a stepping off point. A crash. A deep dive. Dragged up on the shingle beach, blue-lipped, eyes wide open.