Audio Diary
Music by Haworth Hodgkinson
High Moss HM 031 (67:07) • Released 1 August 2025
All music composed, performed and recorded by Haworth Hodgkinson in 2025
Cover from a photograph by Haworth Hodgkinson
Album © Haworth Hodgkinson 2025
Links: Haworth Hodgkinson
Buy album via Bandcamp (secure)
Audio Diary: April 2025
On 1 April 2025 I had the idea to start a musical diary, creating and recording a new piece each day. I didn't know how long I'd be able to keep it going, but I decided each piece would be two minutes long, so that if I reached the end of the month I would have an hour's worth of material, potentially enough for an album. I also decided that each piece should be composed and recorded from scratch on its nominal calendar day, without using any pre-existing material. Thus all the instrumental parts, electronics, samples and real-world sounds were recorded specially for this project. Apart from the two-minute constraint and the requirement for everything to be new, I set myself no other rules so that the resulting pieces would be as varied and contrasted as possible.
Against my initial expectations, I did keep the project going throughout April, and there was never a day when I was short of ideas for a new piece. To my even greater surprise, there are no embarrassing fillers in the sequence — each piece seems to me to have something interesting to say. There were, in fact, one or two failures, but I discarded them and was able to create something new as a replacement before midnight on the days in question. I posted each piece on YouTube on the day it was made, and these are those recordings, in their original order, unedited except to group them in threes. The sound quality here is, of course, much better than YouTube can offer, especially if you download the album in CD quality. Interpolated into the sequence are four Interludes, extra pieces made during June and July 2025, each created on a single day when I found a sound that demanded to be recorded, and made according to the same principles as the main April sequence.
The pieces are generally independent of each other, although numbers 5 and 6 use the same keyboard voices, and 8 and 9 both use birdsong, recorded outside my back and front doors respectively. There are other unintended patterns that I only noticed afterwards, for instance numbers 7, 17 and 27 all feature fat juicy retro synthesiser sounds. All the pieces were recorded at or very close to home, except for two of the interludes, which include sounds caught in Aberdeen railway station and on a bus journey.
The project was a personal challenge for me, a sort of rehabilitation as I recovered slowly from long covid, proving to myself that I could do it. The pieces using wind instruments were a particular challenge as my lung power is still reduced by the effects of covid. I can hear my lung instability in the wavering tones of recorders, melodica and cane flute. A Yamaha keyboard features heavily in the project, as it seems well suited to working quickly. Its 128 built-in voices are a bit crude, sounding to me like parody caricatures of the instruments they imitate, and I perhaps build on that sense of parody as I use the fake trombones, saxophones or panpipes. I bought this keyboard in the spring of 1995, so it has now been serving me well for thirty years, especially when I used to make a lot of instant accompanying music for theatrical productions.
This musical diary is a sort of pattern-book of my musical preoccupations — modes, drones, tuning systems, microtonal pitch deviations, isolated single sounds, echoes and reverberations, environmental sounds (both natural and human in origin), the spoken word (real and artificial), prime numbers, different versions of the same material layered at different speeds.... All of these preoccupations are explored in greater depth in my longer compositions, but they guide most of these little pieces too.
Days 1-3
In the first few days I was settling into the project. The third explores long electronic reverberations.
Days 4-6
I think Day 5 is where the project really takes off. I declared it my favourite so far when I first published it. I left the keyboard programmed overnight, so Day 6 uses the same voices as Day 5, but to rather different effect.
Interlude 1
Made on 18 July 2025, this additional piece was prompted by the sound of dripping water, to which I added great bass recorder, tam-tam, angklung and spring drum, all of them instruments that I felt guilty for omitting from the main sequence.
Days 7-9
Day 7 plays with harmonics, and Days 8 and 9 are the first to incorporate environmental recordings, skylarks outside my back door in number 8 and a blackbird outside my front door in number 9. I've often been frustrated when trying to record skylarks to discover that the loudest stretches of larksong are spoiled by passing helicopters. It occurred to me when making these pieces that this might not be a coincidence — perhaps the larks are shouting to be heard over the aircraft noise. The larks in Day 8 are free of such intrusions, but I let a helicopter provide a drone for the blackbird of Day 9.
Days 10-12
The piece for Day 10 was a late substitute, the first attempt having been discarded. Day 11 is modal, set against drone pitches that do not belong to the mode, and Day 12 was a quick creation on getting back from a day seeing friends.
Interlude 2
This piece is made from ambient recordings from Aberdeen station, recorded on 30 July 2025, with a keyboard added when I got home.
Days 13-15
Day 13 is a game of instrumental coincidences, and Day 14 a slightly melancholy response to rain — the only wet day in the whole month as things turned out. Day 15 prompted me to reflect on reaching half-way through the project and becoming determined to continue until the end of the month.
Days 16-18
I made the piece for Day 16 out of fragments of text from the day's news reports. Day 17 involves 19-tone equal temperament and prime-number bar lengths. Evening birdsong as darkness fell provided the backdrop to a cane flute on Day 18. This cane flute is the most responsive of several that I bought in the 1980s when a shop in St Andrews was selling them for 35p each.
Interlude 3
This was the first of the supplementary pieces to be made. When on 14 June 2025 there was very heavy rain, I was reminded that we had seen virtually no rain in April, and I recorded the downpour.
Days 19-21
The idea for Day 19 was to have several instrumental voices playing in unison, but with staggered entries, rather as in Gaelic psalm singing. The eleven voices are all slightly differently tuned too, those with the longest lag tuned furthest from the precenting bassoon voice.
I recorded morning birdsong for Day 20, but also caught some rather startling wing noise. The main soloist is the incredibly high-pitched yellowhammer, who forms a quartet with two slowed-down yellowhammers and a suitably high-pitched synthesiser voice played by me.
In my childhood, long before I had many musical instruments, I had to use whatever sounds I could find around the house. My father had some resonant sheets of aluminium that I particularly liked. I never knew where they came from — when asked he would say they were from "some piece of equipment". Last year, clearing my parents' home, I found two of these aluminium sheets, and rediscovering their sound world brought back many memories. Day 21 is a duet for one of these aluminium sheets and a rather obstinate synthesiser.
Days 22-24
Since 1970, 22 April has been designated Earth Day. Whether or not there is anything particularly earthy about my Day 22 piece is for you to decide. Every day is an Earth day for me — I'm rather fond of our planet and I've never yet spent a day away from it. It would be nice if we could, you know, look after it a bit better.
The Day 23 piece is made mostly from the sound of chopping carrots. Why? Because somebody gave me a big bag of carrots and I didn't want to appear ungrateful.
As I worked on Day 24, pianist Igor Levit was giving a complete performance of Erik Satie's Vexations in London, so I used Vexations in my piece too. When I did a piece for Kathy Hinde's Vexations project in 2020, I used only Satie's two harmonised versions of his theme, ignoring the unadorned version that he suggests may be played in between, so this time I used only the plain single line, with different keyboard voices taking each crotchet or pair of quavers, separated by pauses. I set this against the ambience of my garden, avoiding a passing helicopter but including towards the end a tractor and harrow in a distant field.
Interlude 4
On 12 July 2025 I found myself on an alarmingly rattly bus and decided to record it, though in the resultant piece I think the rattling perhaps makes less of an impression than the voices of my fellow passengers.
Days 25-27
I spent Day 25 recording and re-recording, eventually settling on something very close to what I started with, exploring a six-note mode made from two interlocking triads that don't share any pitches. There are sixteen keyboards in Day 26, two of them tuned a quarter tone apart from the rest, though the tuning might not be the first thing you notice. Day 27 drops isolated pebbles of sound into a resonant pond.
Days 28-30
A multi-tracked melodica features on Day 28, as I make another post-covid attempt to play a wind instrument.
In my parents' house was an old battered violin that had belonged to my grandfather. I always assumed it belonged to my mother's father, Haworth Taylor, who died just before I was born. My father cast some doubt on this, however, as not long before he died he said he thought the violin might have belonged to his father. The violin came with a bow that had only a few strands of hair intact, and I'm no string player, but nevertheless I tried to use it to accompany the tenor recorder in my Day 29 piece. I have lived with this tenor recorder since I chose it as an eighth birthday present from my parents, but in this piece I hear my post-covid self struggling to breathe as I dialogue with one or other of my grandfathers.
How was I going to bring my diary project to a satisfying close? So many instruments I wanted to use and hadn't, so many ideas for other things I could still do. The blackbird singing loudly outside my window seemed to be demanding inclusion, but he fell silent as soon as I tried to record him. He started singing again when I stopped recording, but I decided to use the springtime ambience of the Buchan landscape without the blackbird. There are other kinds of birdsong, and the wind gently riffles the crop field next to my house. Over this I put a sparse keyboard part, which sounds slightly alien as I tuned it to 19-tone equal temperament. A fitting conclusion? I hope so.
Notes © Haworth Hodgkinson 2025