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1.
SUMMER SPEED 04:46
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2.
JOHN 08:39
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3.
ERRANT 02:53
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4.
ANDREW'S DILEMMA 05:12
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5.
THE DECISIVENESS OF DOUBT 04:56
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6.
DREAMS OF FOG 08:12
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7.
TONES FOR ATONEMENT 07:46
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about

Eight Kinds of Refuge


We were passing the summer at our house in Normandy.

My wife asked, "What time is it, Wade?"
I answered, "July, I think."

There, in the comfort of a thick-walled flint-stone farmhouse, no greater precision was needed. Schedules, obligations and deadlines are for the rest of the year, and autumn had yet to even hint at its still-distant arrival.

But this summer I was unable to visit my Norman home. Family obligations kept me in Madrid throughout the hottest summer in Spanish history.

Once, on a flight somewhere, I sat next to a Cuban who had very clear ideas about things such as how much sweeter sugar was in Cuba than anywhere else in the world. He couldn't tell me, however, whether temperatures were expressed in Centigrade or Fahrenheit there. "Nobody talked in terms of degrees. It was just hot or really hot," he said.

This summer it was really hot in Madrid. The kind of summer that explains why Spaniards invented the expression "un sol de justicia," which is equally eloquent in its characterization of both. I don't know about justice (if, in fact, there is such a thing), but I know the sun was truly implacable this summer. Placation was out of the question. Refuge was the only feasible response.

So, with temperatures in the nineties and low hundreds, Fahrenheit, I took refuge in my house—relative, at best, as I neither have nor want air conditioning—and in my imagination, and I improvised a little music every day during the three hottest weeks of July.

The results are these eight pieces, recorded directly to stereo and gently mastered at Smiling Cow Studio. Fifty-two minutes of music born of the state of semi-conscious reverie such heat imposes on a person much more at home in a forest than on a beach, but all too far from both in the middle of the city. I believe the heat is palpable in these solo improvisations. So, too, is the sense of refuge, of being somewhere else for at least a few minutes, if only in one's mind.

Wade Matthews
Madrid
August, 2022

credits

released September 2, 2022

Recorded in Madrid on 14 -25 July, 2022
Mastered at Smiling Cow Studio, Madrid, 3 - 5 August

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Wade Matthews Madrid, Spain

French-born electro-acoustic improviser & writer. Performs & records solo or with other musicians, dancers, visual artists & sonic explorers throughout Europe & the Americas. His book "Improvisando. La libre creación musical" is considered the leading Spanish-language book on free improvisation. When not traveling, Matthews shares his Madrid apartment with numerous plants & thousands of books. ... more

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