We are delighted to announce that our album Tidal Patterns is released today on 1631 Recordings.

To mark the occasion we thought we would give an overview of the process that went into writing and recording the record.

Whilst most albums begin life as a bunch of scribbled notes in a rehearsal or recording studio, the journey for Tidal Patterns started at 05:45 on the 9^th July 2014, in a ferry terminal in Oban, Scotland.

This was the morning that I (Andy) left the mainland to begin a year working on the small and remote Isle of Coll in the Inner Hebrides.

Early in 2015, having gathered a number of field recordings from various locations on the island, I sat at my keyboard in the old farmhouse in which I was living and began sketching out an instrumental idea to accompany the natural sounds that I had collected. Encouraged by this new writing process, I realised there was potential to make this into a more substantial project.

After an exchange of emails about this we both decided it would be a great idea to write an album about my time on Coll, depicting both the personal journey that I had undertaken while living there and the landscape and nature of the remote island.

Following this we began writing and collating ideas and by the time I returned to Glasgow in July 2015, we had around 30 demos for the album. Throughout my time on the island I also took a number of photos that we both felt would be a great basis for the album’s artwork. The next few months saw a period of further writing and demoing, and we put a successful bid into Creative Scotland in September for funding to record the album.

We entered the studio in January of this year, teaming up with good friend Andy Bush to record the album. The next 3 months were spent sporadically travelling through to Glasgow from Edinburgh and Fife to work on the material that would make up the album. In February, Andy Bush went off on a touring stint with C Duncan as their sound engineer and tour manager which allowed us to record a few album tracks ourselves.

The album was completed early May, and was sent out to a few labels soon after. I guess this was the point we started to get anxious – something you’d been working on for so long was now getting punted out to labels to see if they were interested. It was also at this point that we approached Rafael Anton Irisarri of Black Knoll Studios to master the album – it was a pleasure to work with him and be added to his very impressive list of clients.

Luckily for us David and Mattias at 1631 Recordings fell in love with the album and we’ve been busy working behind the scenes up until now to get the album out into the world.