RELEASE DATE: 24 November 2023
CD: £12.99 | MP3: £7.99 | FLAC: £8.99
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A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time is the latest album from composer Benjamin Tassie. Recorded and filmed in the historic Rivelin Valley in Sheffield, the album features three new water-powered musical instruments that Benjamin designed and built together with the instrument maker Sam Underwood. The delicate recordings on this beautiful album combine music produced by these instruments with the sounds of the environment and live performance to engage poetically with ideas of place, heritage, and our changing relationship with nature.
The Rivelin Valley was once a thriving hub of water-powered industry. Today, the ruins of twenty watermills and twenty-one mill dams can be found along the river’s length – ghosts of Sheffield’s industrial past. Now a haven for wildlife, the weirs, dams, and goits that channelled the water still remain – look into the river, or along its banks, and you will see millstones, the remnants of machinery, fragments of wall. A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time was made in dialogue with this evocative landscape. New music reframes the river, blurring the boundaries between the cultural and the natural, the new and the old.
Played by the river, the three water-powered instruments (a harpsichord, hurdy gurdy, and a water organ or ‘hydraulis’) produce sound mechanically. A water-wheel turns, operating a mechanism that plucks the strings within the harpsichord. In the hurdy gurdy, another water-wheel rubs a rosined wheel against two strings, producing a resonant, ancient drone. The hydraulis, meanwhile, uses the river’s water to displace air in its chamber. As it is submerged, organ pipes are sounded in a system based loosely on an Ancient Greek design.
“What these ten tracks end up conveying most concretely is the physicality of the river itself, a landmark equal parts fixed and mutable.”
The Quietus
“Musician Benjamin Tassie has built bespoke, hand-made instruments and then lowered them into the River Rivelin – and in the process reawakened older ideas about our place within nature.”
Now Then
“The album was made in dialogue with this evocative landscape. New music reframes the river, blurring the boundaries between the cultural and the natural, the new and the old.”
Sheffield Telegraph
Working at dawn or dusk, each track on the album was recorded as a single take at the site of a former watermill. Ten locations were used in total – Hind Wheel (where a mill was established in the 1580s), Walkley Bank Tilt (the site of the last mill to close in the 1950s), and others. On some tracks, musicians perform alongside the river, playing both ancient and modern instruments.
Rebecca Lee plays the Renaissance bass viol and Rob Bental plays the Nyckelharpa (an historical Swedish instrument), while Benjamin plays the Medieval rebec and lap steel guitar.
Benjamin Tassie (creator of A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Time) says, “Playing beside the water meant becoming attuned to its sounds and pace, to the way the river played the instruments, to how the environment dictated the tempo and feeling of a track. Recording was a process of listening as much as it was of making sound; of standing still and becoming attuned, momentarily, to the landscape. I hope that A Ladder is Not the Only Kind of Timeoffers the listener a moment of such connection with the river.”
Birmingham Record Company 