Available on CD with accompanying photo card insert from Somehow Recordings here http://www.somehowrecordings.co.uk/page2.html (scroll down the page to find the EP). If sold out please message me via Soundcloud as I have a few CD's remaining.

Savaran - Strandline feat. Barbara De Dominicis (full streaming EP - Somehow Recordings)

If you have a short attention span don't listen to this track :-) There are a lot of constantly evolving and fairly quiet sounds in this piece, particularly over the last third of the track. It needs to be played in a quiet room with the lights low for max effect...... 

Microcosmos (from Gradient Audio Microcosmos EP)

A draft demo of some new dark ambient work with the talented Danish poet and photographer Sarah Maria Raun https://www.facebook.com/delikatraun?fref=nf_fr

Butterfly drawing by Nicki on deviantart

The Valley (featuring poetry by Sarah Maria Raun)

A track from my collaborative project with Danish poet and photographer Sarah Maria Raun. Release in late Summer/early Autumn on the Vent Sounds label  http://www.vent-sounds.co.uk

Willingly (featuring poetry by Sarah Maria Raun)

An exercise in recording the sonic depth of an open landscape. The Holly Banks Nature Reserve is located near Melverley in Shropshire and is an attempt to re-create the wetland meadows that have vanished in this riverine confluence landscape since flood defences, drainage channels and enclosure were introduced in the late eighteenth century. 

I used a Tascam DR-100 Mk II digital recorder recording via the internal mics on high gain, level 8. I also used JrF C-series hydrophones (high gain, level 10) to record sounds in the pond scrape immediately in front of the recording location. 

I placed the recorder on the ground close to reeds rustling in the wind on the edge of the pond to give foreground interest. There are three recordings layered here including a general ambience of the area in the track photo, a recording of buzzards wheeling overhead and a hydrophone recording. 

The sense of depth in the recording is aided by pheasant shooting on the Criggion Estate at the foot of the hills in the far distance, dogs barking on nearby farms, farm machinery and vehicles on the nearby lanes. 

I quite like the juxtaposition in this recording of human endeavor to manage the environment for the benefit of wildlife in the foreground, while in the background we are managing it it to shoot wildlife !

This is part of a sequence of soundscape recordings on nature reserves in mid Wales and the Welsh Marches borderland for the Safe Havens project.     

Holly Banks Nature Reserve 6-10-12

Available as a free download on the Halcyon Days EP here http://archive.org/details/Savaran-HalcyonDays_113

Based around a field recording taken on Gartheryr above Betws Y Coed in Snowdonia, North Wales which includes human sounds from the valley below mixed with hillside wind, streams and birdsong. 

Sojourn (from the Halcyon Days EP)

Available as a free download on the Halcyon Days EP here http://archive.org/details/Savaran-HalcyonDays_113

See blog entry at  http://savaranmusic.tumblr.com/

Our holiday in Cornwall (far south west tip of the UK) this Christmas was soundtracked by constant wind noise howling around the house (known as Arra Venton) which we were staying in. The landscape here is ancient and we were surrounded by 3000+ year old field walls and evidence of ancient settlements everywhere we looked, from the granite tors on the high moorland to the coastal cliffs below us. The area known as Penwith, between St. Ives in the north, Penzance to the south and Lands End to the west, has a huge sense of place and we have been drawn to it for many years.

It was on a particularly windy pre-solstice night that I was playing around with the Korg Monotron synthesizer, trying to extract some interesting drone textures from it that could potentially be played as a long-form live piece from fade in to fade out. This is no easy feat as anyone who owns a Monotron will attest. It is more prone to producing pulses, gurgles, screams and shrieks than something representing a slowly unfolding ambient drone. On rare occasions though you can hit a sweet spot using those five tiny knobs where an interesting timbre of sound breaks through. Very careful tweaks to the buttons, while holding down one note on the touch sensitive ‘keyboard’, can deliver a convincing drone track where changes in pitch and tone are manipulated via the LFO and VCF alone to give some textural colour and development. It is sound textures like this which interest me the most in music and I don’t particularly have to have melody or a formulaic structure present in music to enjoy it, which is probably why my tastes have shifted to the experimental scene lately.

So I set about recording a live piece in one take just for the pure fun of it. While doing this I was conscious of the sound of the wind intruding through my rather leaky headphones and I was amazed how the sound of the wind and the drone seemed to be playing off against each other. The whole atmosphere of the developing track was somehow redolent of the surrounding landscape and I wanted to capture that in the final track. To get the wind layer I attached contact mics to the guy wire of an electricity line post near the house and just left the Sony PCM-M10 recorder going for 40 minutes. It captured wind noise, the sound of dead bracken fronds scraping the right cable and an underlying hum from the wires - all of this can be heard in the final track with deep listening on headphones….

I added some light reverb and delay using a standard Live 8 ambient effect, but that is the only post recording processing that has been done. 

Monotron Droning v The Wind (Arra Venton) - Halcyon Days EP

NEW RELEASE ANNOUNCEMENT 1/9/14 The new Savaran album The Spaces In Between has now been released on the Ember Music label. Available here http://savaran.bandcamp.com/ 

Album "A Comet's Tale" is available on the Subterranean Tide label as a *Free Download* here http://www.subterraneantide.com/st03-a-comets-tale---savaran.html

EP 'Halcyon Days' available on the Assembly Field label as a *Free Download* here http://archive.org/details/Savaran-HalcyonDays_113

Savaran CD 'Strandline' on the Somehow Records label feat. vocals by Barbara De Dominicis and Francesca Genco. ORDER HERE (scroll down page) http://www.somehowrecordings.co.uk/page2.html

3" CD for the Flaming Pines Label project 'Rivers Home' is OUT NOW!! Two tracks capturing the essence of the River Dovey in Mid Wales in soundscape form http://flamingpines.com/releases.htm

The Savaran EP 'Observations' is released at the Audio Gourmet label here http://music.audiogourmet.co.uk/album/observations

The Savaran EP 'Resonances' is available as a free download release on the FeedbackLoop label here http://feedbacklooplabel.blogspot.com/2011/05/fbl014-savaran-resonances.html  

The Microcosmos EP on Gradient Audio is now released !  Copies can be downloaded here http://bit.ly/ibotkP and are also be available on Beatport, iTunes, Amazon, Juno and Addictech http://bit.ly/iiz9V2. 

------------------------------------------------------------ 
Hi

The tracks on here represent a mix of my ambient, electro-acoustic, experimental, soundscaping and electronic works.

The music is created on a variety of hardware and software synthesizers using Ableton 
Live for recording. Field recorded sounds are frequently added to the mix and much of the sound is heavily processed with an array of effects. 

The majority of the tracks are fairly ambient in nature and explore experimental soundscapes, but occasionally the urge to create something more beat driven, rhythmic and downright noisy takes over!

The music is inspired by the random daily events that life throws at you, landscapes, environment, atmosphere, astronomy, geology, past cultures, or just the indefinable need to make music.

I am always interested in collaborative projects with other musicians, sound artists, female vocalists and any poetry writers who would like to vocalise their works over an ambient or experimental music background, so do get in contact if you like what you hear. 

Thanks for listening! 

Mark

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