Cassette
London-based musician Luke Cowan returns with SPRiNG!, a release that trades the slow-blooming architectures of Six Places for something more immediate, loose-limbed and provisional. Conceived as the first in a planned seasonal cycle, it documents a moment of emergence: music produced quickly, instinctively, under a set of self-imposed constraints.
SPRiNG! begins with Walworth Road, composed in a single sitting in February 2025, built from a tentative improvisation on a sanza acquired in a South London charity shop. From this contingent origin, a method follows. Over the next days, Cowan produced a series of pieces according to a fixed system: all music improvised, all in F♯ Lydian, each track recorded in a single sitting, overdubbed ‘blind’, without reference to previous layers.
A particular logic results. Instruments – sanza, piano, clarinet, dulcimer, guitars, harmonium – proceed without direct coordination, converging by chance rather than design. Harmonies surface incidentally; rhythms misalign, then cohere; textures accumulate without hierarchy. A recurring melody, initially built from the black notes of the keyboard, threads through the release, testing how far such a reduced figure can sustain continuity across its duration.
The system does not hold. As the process developed, Cowan extended the material outward, inviting a group of collaborators to respond instinctively to the recordings. Their contributions – drums, upright bass, vibraphone, trumpet, saxophone – are largely unedited, entering the pieces without full awareness of their internal structure. What began as a solitary exercise becomes increasingly collective, the terms of authorship shifting accordingly: Luke Cowan & Friends.
Rules established to generate material are gradually bent, then abandoned. SPRiNG! mirrors its seasonal premise: a movement from constraint toward proliferation. Where Six Places traced imagined geographies through extended accumulation, this release locates form in contingency – in overlaps, interruptions, and the partial alignment of independently produced elements. What it offers is not resolution but music in flux, caught in the act of becoming, reaching tentatively toward whatever comes next.
