I discovered a Universal City Studios newsreel in the public domain, covering the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. For the Airship album trailer, I used video from the first half of the newsreel, showing the airship in flight, as the newscaster sets the scene for the accident. In the second half, the Hindenburg’s final moments are described in dramatic language, with footage to match. It is a moving film, telling the story of the world’s most famous airship disaster.
The track
Accompanying the imagery is an excerpt from the album title track, a seven-minute instrumental piece describing an airship appearing on the horizon, sweeping overhead, and sailing into the distance. The music is slow and dignified, making for a somewhat dramatic trailer. But, I think it is appropriate. To me, airships are the most breathtaking things ever to grace the skies; the album is my attempt at conveying the awe they inspire. I hope I have succeeded.
USS Los Angeles does a spectacular nose stand whilst tied to the mooring mast at Lakehurst, New Jersey (1926). The 200-metre (660-foot) airship was upended by a turbulent wind, but slowly righted itself. There were no serious injuries to the crew of 25. (Images: Navy Lakehurst Historical Society)
Airships and their lovers
A hopeless romantic—at least, when it comes to lighter-than-air flight—I have written my third airship poem. The first was Silently You Sail, on an airship in flight (the words became lyrics to the track by the same name on the Airship album), and the second, Sheltering Airships, on airships in their hangars.
Airships and their masts
This time, I have focused on the mooring mast. A mooring mast is a docking point for an airship. It is, essentially, an enormous tower fitted with a mechanism at its top to which the airship bow is fixed by a mooring line. I recently saw footage of this process and it reminded me of a kiss: shall we say, a finely judged procedure.
Left: British MPs walk onto the R101 airship gangplank, in Cardington, England, in the 1920s. (Image: Library of Congress) Right: A close-up view of an airship being prepared for undocking. (Image: Unknown)
Airships and their battles
Winds and rain can cause an airship to lose altitude, especially in freezing conditions where ice forms on the hull. The airship is weighed down, making manoeuvering difficult or impossible, resulting in disaster. The poem describes the mooring mast as the lover of such an ill-fated airship. Like Silently You Sail and Sheltering Airships, it is short and sweet, but I hope it captures this fanciful romance:
Mooring Mast
The lonely tower waits in vain
In an icy field,
Unaware of what befell
The airship in the wind.
Earlier that fateful day,
Softly in the mist,
One last time the zeppelin
He had gently kissed.
When I submitted Airship to online music distributors, I had to choose a genre for the album. From the official options, it came down to either “Electronic” or “Rock”. I selected “Electronic”, the closest generic match, but my music actually falls somewhere in between. It falls under Post-rock, a genre that is somewhat difficult to define.
The problem with “post-rock”
Its exclusion from the available options is, perhaps, not all that surprising because as a descriptor of a creative category, it tells you almost nothing about an artist’s sound. It includes so vast a range of musical styles that it is rendered just about meaningless. For purposes of classification, this is a nightmare, but for all others—particularly the creation and discovery of music—it is positively heaven sent. I could, for example, describe my work as “experimental post-minimalist ambient electronic progressive rock” (or something equally absurd and pretentious), but how practical is that melange of identifiers to me, or a listener who hopes to discover it? “Post-rock” is a neat, necessary and welcome contraction. Whilst in its “strictest” sense it is essentially non-traditional rock music made with rock instruments, that definition only considers bands such as Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky and This Will Destroy You, whose music epitomises post-rock in its “purest” form. But over time, through a kind of osmosis, the term has come to encapsulate a host of sub-genres, making up a particular body of experimental music. Today, it includes ambient bands like Hammock, experimental projects like Jónsi & Alex, shoegaze bands like Jeniferever and even dream pop groups like Kyte.
Post-rock is therefore almost a necessarily nebulous term. In his Treblezine article “10 Essential Post-Rock Albums“, Jeff Terich describes post-rock as follows: “It’s a genre in which texture, tone and atmosphere has a more prominent role than hooks or verses and choruses. Its song structure can vary widely, or in some cases be nonexistent. There is both more improvisation and more complex editing techniques. Sometimes it’s all instrumental, and in other cases it’s built on samples or spoken word passages. The rules are pretty pliable, as long as it’s not really a straightforward rock song.” You can tell by his description that there are hardly any rules; and post-rock artists break whatever rules there are in every conceivable direction, rewriting them in their own image. This creates a treasure trove of musical experimentation, a genre that introduces music lover and maker alike to a plethora of ingenuity. It delivers everything from the clean, natural compositions of Balmorhea, to the texture-laden, synth-driven depths of Belong; it embraces the vast, rock-instrumented symphonies of Mono and the sublime, cinematic soundscapes of Eluvium; but it also celebrates the melancholy strings of Stars of the Lid, to say nothing of the aching lamentations of Sigur Ròs. It is a universe of the new, the interesting and the strange.
A post-rock novice
A newcomer to the field, I tentatively describe my music as “ambient electronic post-rock” because those are key themes I can identify. Within these parameters I can explore and develop rules of my own. The process is challenging, even intimidating, but that is the nature of exploration—and I would like to think that I am here to explore.
Forgotten Fields 