Press release:

riverrun is an ambient side project by Daniel Land of the bands Daniel Land & The Modern Painters, and Engineers.

Taking its name from the famous opening line of James Joyce’s modernist masterpiece Finnegan’s Wake, the riverrun project (always in lowercase letters) is a series of ‘secret’ ambient recordings that Land has been working for over a decade in parallel to his songs.

Throughout the last fifteen years, Land amassed a library of several hundred textures and soundcolours which, as he puts it, “Were just little ideas created when my attention was focused on something else – normally while I was recording a more traditional song”. In the process of engineering and recording a track he would become sidetracked by a new sound and would, in his words, “Spend a while exploring the ramifications of it".

The riverrun project came together slowly over the last year after Land stumbled upon the idea of using some of the sketches as film music. As he went through his tapes, Land began to blend some of these sketches and fragments together, painstakingly matching key signatures and looking for interesting contrasts and juxtapositions. Elements recorded on a four track cassette machine in 1995 ended up sitting next to new guitar sounds from the cutting room floor of the Modern Painters record. Old tracks that Land had thought were finished ended up being incorporated into newer tracks, which in turn would become blended into a still newer piece - each step of the process adding another layer of detail to the aural patchwork.

The end result of this compositional process is an aural canvas of almost unimaginable complexity, whose deeper level of subliminal detail (sometimes literally hundreds of layers of sound are running concurrently) belies the surface simplicity of the music.

Though very different from the dream-pop work of The Modern Painters (even Land sees the riverrun tracks as being “diametrically opposed” to it) the riverrun record was finished at the same time as the Painters longplayer and can be seen as a curious contrast to it - the other side of the musical coin, as it were. As Daniel says, "Sometimes when you’re making records, your ears get so tired, you get sick of hearing songs. The riverrun record was always the one I’d go back to when I couldn’t hear songs any more – it was what I’d put on at 4am when I'd finished recording and it was dark outside and I needed something at a different pace to relax into.

“It’s probably not a record you’d put on in polite company, it’s got more of a solitary feeling; a strange kind of nostalgia. It has the same undertones of melancholy I felt growing up in Devon, with all those big empty spaces and deserted winter beaches. I like that feeling a lot”.