Eyebrow - Strata (Album art)

Album art inspiration

Eyebrow - Strata (2017)

Paul Wigens - drums, percussion, violin, bowed guitar

Pete Judge - trumpet, electronics

Images by Paul Wigens

Design by Jake McMurchie

Eyebrow are a trumpet and drums duo based in Bristol, UK. Formed in 2009, their music evolves out of improvisations which are reassembled into structured pieces with unexpectedly cinematic sweeps, like a journey through a slowly-changing landscape. The band’s 5th album, Strata, was released last month (October 2017).

The new album from the Bristolian duo Eyebrow was destined to be called Deep Time, a concept that is rooted in the work of  Scottish geologist, physician, naturalist and experimental agriculturalist James Hutton (1726-1797). It was his belief that the Earth was perpetually being formed, through a process of rock erosion, sedimentation and formation. The idea that the Earth is alive was first scientifically discussed by Hutton, he anticipated the Gaia hypothesis proposed by James Lovelock in the 1960s. This theory proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on our planet.

Paul Wigens

Unfortunately Eyebrow had to find a new title for their imminent CD release when Harrison Birtwistle premiered a new orchestral work titled Deep Time in June 2017. Yet the themes and metaphors of Deep Time (Erosion, Formation, Synergy and Gaia) still embed themselves in Eyebrow's 5th album Strata. 

Paul Wigens created the album cover artwork, he explains more about its creation,
"The original images were of sunlight through curtains and slatted blinds which created the abstract wavy lines. The images were created in the Brushes app on my phone and enlarged and enhanced in Photoshop. I used my finger to 'paint' over the pictures. Great fun!"

Pete Judge

To the viewer the album cover contains many stories, flowing far away from its sunshine origins. The purists see an anticline, a geological formation of folded rock strata. The more simple interpretation is as plain as black and white, two distinct personalities, Judge and Wigens. The lines don't sit beside each other in perfect definition though, they ebb and blur, moving as the eye scans over them. Symbolic perhaps of Eyebrow, whose music seeps and bleeds between genres, travelling towards new music landscapes that have yet to be defined.

Read an excellent review of Strata at The Jazzmann.

All Eyebrow’s albums are available to download at: https://eyebrow.bandcamp.com/

See Eyebrow Live
1st February 2018 - St James Wine Vaults, 10 St James's Street, BA1 2TW Bath, Somerset

Blurt - Pagan Strings Restrung

Ted Milton

BLURT
Ted Milton - voice, saxophone, performance
Chris Vine - guitar (+ voice)
Paul Wigens - drums (+ voice)

Date - 18th October 2017
Venue - Iklectik Art Lab, London, UK
Current album - Live at Oto (Salamander Records, 2016)

BLURT recorded the Pagan Strings album in Ulm, Southern Germany, in ’92, at the end of a thirty consecutive dates tour. Ted Milton played sax and vocalised. On guitar was Chris Vine, who was with the band from ’90 to ’95, and Paul Wigens, Blurt drummer from ’85 to ’98. Some twenty years later the original line-up reformed to play this one-off Pagan Strings Concert.  Milton also performed “Molecule” – a short performance piece, and recited poems from the recently published Milton Text Book.

Ted Milton

Ted Milton once described himself as "a tone-deaf musician" and at the end of a sax-part during a Blurt gig in Antwerp he proclaimed with a broad smile: "Oh, why don't I just take some lessons?" All this to say Ted doesn't see himself as a ground-breaking nor virtuoso sax player. However, when in good form his instrument becomes an extension of his body and wonderful sonic landscapes enfold. 

Paul Wigens

Paul Wigens joined Blurt in 1986 after Jake Milton left. He can be heard first time on the "Poppycock" album. Paul is a human metronome, taking his musicianship very serious. He studied with American jazz drummer CLIFFORD JARVIS (Sun Ra/Archie Shepp/Pharoah Saunders) in the mid nineties. He has played with the groups Grand Drive (Sony/BMG), The Blue Aeroplanes and Cousteau and mosy recently with Eyebrow. As musician and composer with Cardiff-based physical theatre company Earthfall, he worked on the shows Forever and Ever, Fabulous Wounds, Rococco Blood and Bakkus and the BAFTA-winning short film Too Old to Dream.

Chris Vine

Chris Vine replaced Steve Eagles in 1990 to record the "Pagan Strings" album. Before he had lived in the U.S.A. and played in The Scientific Americans and with a.o. Eliott Sharp. Chris changed the sound of Blurt trough his fingerpicking guitar style, using a thumb pick to accentuate the low notes or to strum the strings very hard. He also made frequent use of an electro-harmonix analog delay and octaver-effects. Chris now spends his time between the UK and Brazil and writes music for theatre and dance companies.

Eyebrow - Garden City - album inspiration

Typography and additional design is by Jason Ewing at
The Group of Seven www.thegroupofseven.co.uk

Pete Judge - Jazz Café 05/03/2014

Today is the official release of Eyebrow's album Garden City on the New York label Ninety and Nine Records. Here at Art of Jazz we like to champion the art and artist's who help us visualise the music. Paul Wigen's it seems is our Renaissance Man of the day. He provides us not only with drums, percussion and violin on the album but also the photographs that adorn the 6 page CD sleeve.




Photo - Paul Wigens

Eyebrow is a trumpet and drums duo based in Bristol, UK, formed in 2009. Its music evolves out of improvisations which are reassembled into structured pieces. Paul Wigens studied with American jazz drummer Clifford Jarvis (Sun Ra/Archie Shepp/Pharoah Saunders) and has played with Grand Drive, The Blue Aeroplanes, Limbo, Cousteau and alongside the warped genius of Ted Milton in Blurt. 
Pete Judge recently played at the Jazz Café here in London with Get The Blessing where I had the pleasure of drawing him live. He has also composed music for film & live ensemble projects for Shetland Arts Trust, Portland Royal Manor Theatre, Gloucester Royal Hospital, Bristol’s Brunel 200 and Aberystwyth Silver Band.



The photos which wrap the Garden City album together were all taken by Paul Wigens. He cites the Hipgnosis album art of the 1970's as an influence but Eyebrow's is much more subtle. No melting face of Peter Gabriel or chewing gum breast like the Scorpions. The images talk of the detail and subtlety amongst a harsher landscape. Underneath the clod of grass on the cover is hidden a brick. The album's concepts are those of growth and decay, and the transitory narrative of Nature’s cycle. The title "Garden City’ refers to the ambitious town planning movement whose self-contained communities were surrounded by greenbelts of land, containing proportionate areas of residences, industry and agriculture.



album centrefold

Paul explains "The cardboard packaging reminds me of 1960s brutalist architecture and my parents had a red Heinkel bubble car which I remember travelling in as a child (It konked out in the end and dad gave it away to the milkman). I put them together in homage to my birthplace of Stevenage New Town; one of a number built north of London following WW2 to alleviate housing shortages."

Garden City has 7 tunes that populate the album with varying degrees of city, industry and agriculture. Blind Summit has a cinematic dystopian edge which belies the utopian ideals of our Garden City theme. It is a steely assessment by a being (animal or human?) purveying its domain. There is control and superiority emphasised by Wigen's drums, and a toll of bell across hollow landscape.



Unused album photo  -
Paul Wigens

As we traverse Eyebrow's world along Golden Road there is a distortion that affects you physically. Your body feels like it is being made into jam. It simmers, squeezes and amongst the viscosity there is a sweet tang. Mr Choppy brings back the mean beat after the refreshing wash of Pete Judge on the preceding Lustre. Choppy challenges you to makes everyday living into a piece of performance art if you are willing to play the game. Slow your pace to that of the music, be complicit in the pleasure of doing this for yourself, for your body, experience the new Bristolian Tai Chi.

The 13 minute Thaw is a sawing, repetitive piece that reflects the gentle textures of the album art. Mosses, lichens and imperfections are flattened to pattern. Amongst the shards of drums sit the soft dewy beds of a pulse. Scrim is an impressive swell of a much larger force that features the rumbling Jim Barr (Bass guitar and pedals). It is a living mountain of a tune. An elder god is contained within it. Garden City ends with a puzzle in Pinch Point. The thought wanders the mind like it was trapped within a Perspex 3D maze until the inevitable pinch, the moment which asks as many questions as it answers.

Pete Judge sums up the album, "the title and the artwork suggest, in a beautifully succinct way, the city-dweller’s search for space and wildness. We both live in Bristol, a city which still has at least one muddy boot in the farmland that surrounds it. Eyebrow’s music seems built on the interlocking patterns of buildings and traffic movements, but also stretches out and up, journeying slowly through real and imagined landscapes."

Listen for yourself (below) or see Eyebrow release the album on Sunday 30th November at The Brewery Theatre, featuring live visuals from Kathy Hinde, and special musical guests Jim Barr (Get The Blessing, Portishead) and Tim Allen (Bat For Lashes).
8pm, £8 (£6 concessions).

AL.