Spirit Level (Miles Spilsbury & Gorse Panshawe) – Spirit Level LP [ND014]

Following on from his debut album, Miles Spilsbury returns to New Dawn with Spirit Level. A new project in collaboration with close friend Gorse Panshawe (Slugabed – who also produced Miles Spilsbury’s first album Light Manoeuvres). Recorded over one weekend in a weaving shed in Frome, in the English countryside. Surrounded by reels of yarn, they explored with saxophones, flutes, dusty old keyboards & drum machines. The resulting record conjures the murk and moss of Forestland and grounds with grooves from the Bongo setting on a Casio keyboard. Jake Long added mallet drums from his London studio to round off the album.

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Spirit Level (Miles Spilsbury & Gorse Panshawe) – Spirit Level LP [ND014]

Miles Spilsbury – Light Manoeuvres [ND012]

Debut album from UK jazz saxophonist and composer Miles Spilsbury, featuring Carlos Niño. ‘Light Manoeuvres’ is about warmth, generosity and openness. The music which would become Light Manoeuvres was sketched in fragments, but began to take shape in earnest during a period of living under the Marseille haze in the South of France. The specific character and opacity of the light in Marseille inspired the album title which imagines the movement of light passing over different subjects and spaces in intricate motion. Sand blows over from the Sahara on the Sirocco wind and is whipped up by the Mistral, the Marseille sky becomes golden and vapoured, then intermittently pastel blue. That image stuck while shaping this body of work, and became integral to the function of the compositions – which act as jumping off points for the players and myself, vehicles for improvisation and gateways to something else entirely. 

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Miles Spilsbury – Light Manoeuvres [ND012]