Clodagh
Simonds could never quite see where she was going when she was making The Salt
Garden III, the final part of a trilogy of EPs released by Fovea Hex, the name
the Irish singer and composer has worked under for the last decade and a half.
In that time, Simonds has produced a sepulchral-sounding body of work that
fuses arcane-sounding chorales with brooding electronic underscores that recall
everything from Ligetti and Arvo Part through to the nouveau medievalism of
Dead Can Dance and the three 1980s albums by 4AD Records supergroup, This
Mortal Coil.
This
has been the case on the Salt Garden trilogy, as well as Fovea Hex’s first
series of EPs, Bloom, Huge and Allure, compiled as Neither Speak Nor Remain Silent.
It was the same too on the full-length Here is Where We Used to Sing, released
in 2011. Contributors to these have included Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and film
composer Carter Burwell, who have worked alongside a core of Colin Potter from
Nurse with Wound, violinist Cora Venus Lunny, cellist Kate Ellis, and East
Lothian-based composer Michael Begg. Regular collaborator Laura Sheeran was
sadly too busy to take part in the new record.
With
a name drawn from the part of the retina that gives the clearest vision, but
made blurry by the curse of its second half, it is Simonds, however, who is the
heart of Fovea Hex.
“It’s
as if I’ve been working in a dark room, and can’t quite see what it is until it
gradually becomes clearer,” Simonds says about making the four pieces on the Salt
Garden III, released in a limited 10” vinyl edition on former Porcupine Tree
driving force Steven Wilson’s Headphone Dust label. “It’s been instinctive and
intuitive to me rather than planned. When I’m writing lyrics I haven’t a clue
what it’s going to be about until the words appear, and gradually a picture
emerges.”
This
could arguably be said too of Fovea Hex as an entity, with Simonds initially
approaching Andrew M McKenzie, aka The Hafler Trio before being put in touch
with Potter. Simonds first heard Begg on MySpace, while she knew Ellis, Lunny
and Sheeran from Ireland’s music scenes.
“The
outside input was very much needed,” says Simonds. “I knew the kind of sounds I
was after, but I had no idea how to get them, and no idea about virtual and
digital technology. In retrospect, it was quite unusual then to combine real
strings and voices with electronic music that isn’t dance music.”
As
with most things around Simonds, the name of Fovea Hex came about by accident.
“It
just kind of appeared, and I thought it was a nice phrase,” she says. “It
resounded with the idea of not being able to see clearly, and that always
interested me since I was very small, this idea that we don’t always get it,
and how we can feel strange about how we perceive things. There was something
there about not seeing that I liked. On a purely practical level, my name gets
misspelt and mispronounced so much that I felt I had to have something. If I’d
been called Mary Smith, I might have stuck with that and not bothered.”
Simonds’
musical journey to Fovea Hex has been a remarkable one. Growing up in Ireland,
she formed her first band, Mellow Candle, aged eleven, and had her first record
out by the time she was fifteen. A Mellow Candle album, Swaddling Songs,
featured work later covered by All About Eve and Stephen Malkmus. Simonds
played keyboards, harpsichord and mellotron on Thin Lizzy’s second album,
Shades of a Blue Orphanage, released in 1972, and sang backing vocals on Mike
Oldfield’s follow-up to Tubular Bells, Hergest Ridge, as well as on Oldfield’s
subsequent album, Ommadawn. Simonds would collaborate with Oldfield again in
1990, singing on his Amarok album.
Inbetween,
Simonds had stints in New York and London, playing a residency in CBGBS with a
band called The Same and composing music for La MaMa experimental theatre
company. She also worked for Virgin Records on both sides of the Atlantic
before eventually moving back to Ireland in the 1990s. By that time, Simonds
was ready to concentrate on music full time again.
“I
wouldn’t say I ever stopped music,” she says, “but I got stuck in day job hell
for years and years. Then I had a bit of a health scare, which was a wake-up
call about what I was doing. Moving back to Ireland, I was so happy to be able
to wake up and be able to decide what I was doing that day. I was broke, but I
was writing again, and I was given a piano that appeared like a miracle.”
A
mini-album, Six Elementary Songs, was released under Simonds’ own name in 1996,
beginning the slow-burning evolution of Fovea Hex that has led to The Salt
Garden. Beyond this, Simonds isn’t sure what she’ll do next.
“It was
a long labour, making the record,” she says, “and it feels like I’m just able
to draw breath again. I’ll probably not work on anything new again for a while,
but having said that, I know that as soon as I sit down in the studio and open
up that folder of ideas, which I haven’t done now for about a year, it will be
a case of, yes, let’s do that.”
The
Salt Garden III by Fovea Hex is available now on Headphone Dust Records.
www.janetrecords.com
The Herald, December 14th 2019
ends
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