Wingbeats (Max Cooper Remix)
Hidden Orchestra

Beautifully complex, “Wingbeats” features rich orchestral layers of a piano, cello, glockenspiel and organic snippets of field recordings woven into the finer details of the track, each one telling a different story. The sound of birds fluttering in to feed on crumbs in a rural British garden become the bass drum emerging from an imaginary string orchestra built from layers of Su-a Lee’s soaring cello, while a suspenseful, early-hours piano jam is accompanied by the breathy tones of the Turkish Mey, an instrument Acheson picked up on tour in Istanbul. The dawn chorus featured in “Wingbeats” was recorded in 2014 from the window of the house he grew up in in Sussex, and the 5am toll of nearby church bells can be heard towards the end of the recording. The cohesive percussion running throughout the track began as fast, scattered patterns recorded by Jamie Graham which Acheson took to build a drum arrangement, selecting loops of hats, snares and rides, before interweaving Tim Lane’s tight backbeats and loose, washy ride cymbals.

Remixing the track, Max Cooper shifts the focus in line with these layers and playful arrangements, creating an intricate sound with depth. “I liked the idea that there is some sort of computational frayed edge”, Cooper explains; “It sounds like real recordings at a glance, but a closer look at the forms has something weird going on in there”. In his reorientation, Cooper builds a motif around the beautiful chord structure hidden within the original, which is teased between excursions into live instrumental jams and a tremendous chord sequence.