“Whereas humans have a calf and thigh bone, horses have three articulations in the leg, so he took four of those bigger bones, chopped the ends off and made flutes out of them, stuffing bees wax into the end to create the opening. He’d made something called the ‘sharpsichord’, which is a very big pin-barrel organ that Bjork ended up using on her Biophilia tour. I found somebody on eBay who was emigrating and had a large horse skeleton, so he boxed it up and I took a whole collection of bones to the relatively well-known musical instrument maker Henry Dagg in Faversham. “The skeleton process was relatively painless. How did you go about sourcing the physical skeleton and turning that into instruments? It was a bit like going on an archaeological dig or panning for gold.” I gave the orchestral musicians ribs and some horse hair to make their own bows to play their instruments with, so, collectively, we were all feeling our way and trying to look for something. “As mentioned, at first I didn’t really know I was doing that and all the musicians I worked with didn’t know either – they’d never played bone flutes or a horse pelvis live before. By following my nose and the history of music, I inevitably ended up with this virtual or digital reincarnation of the horse. Then you hear a lyre, which is made out of a pelvis before the sound moves into electronics, sound manipulation and sampling. “It starts with bone flutes that I had made out of the skeleton and the next sound you hear is the skin of a horse stretched over wood to make a horse skin drum. So there is a reincarnation aspect that follows the musical story.īy following my nose and the history of music, I inevitably ended up with this virtual or digital reincarnation of the horse “Even 200 years ago, if we wanted to make a piece of music out of a horse we’d have had to imitate the sound of what a horse might make while running or the emotion it might arouse in us, whereas now we can take field recordings or sounds from the internet and use the real sound of a horse. The way the album unfolds sounds like a process of reanimation, from the sourcing of the bones to recreating the motion of a racehorse… That’s the image on the cover of the album.” “Ironically, when I was making the record a metal detectorist was interested in finding out what was on our land and dug up a little bronze age offering to the horse gods that’s somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000 years old. Horse racing is also the second biggest sport after football and subsidised by the government to the tune of £100m per year, so from sport and leisure to industry, the horse is woven through our culture. After some research I realised that we wouldn’t have had the industrial revolution without them because we relied on horses to dig coal from the ground, haul it to the surface, carry people around and transform our economy. “The more I noticed or thought about horses, they seemed to appear absolutely everywhere. I knew I wanted to make a record out of a skeleton, but hadn’t begun to think about everything else that the album would become. The horse ended up being the largest, but I still bought it without really knowing why. “It could have been any animal because when it started I was looking for a diplodocus or a bison on eBay – whatever was the biggest skeleton I could find. Did you see this as the celebration of the horse in particular, or could it have been any animal?
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