UNDER The World, the new album by award-winning musician and composer Jessica Danz, was recorded in a place that once must have seemed the edge of the world – the island of Great Bernera off the west coast of the Isle of Lewis.
Set on the Atlantic shoreline, Black Bay Studio is one of the most remote recording studios in Europe.
Recorded when Danz lived on Lewis, Under The World often shares qualities with the ocean – a feeling of tumult, foreboding and an awe-inspiring vastness.
It was the first album to be made at the new studio and, thanks to founder Pete Fletcher’s expert skills, retains some of the character of the room in which it was recorded.
Perhaps it’s a trick of the mind, but underneath Danz’s haunted vocals, rich violin and dramatic piano – a 1930s Bechstein grand – you can sense the room’s natural creaks and hums.
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“The room had beautiful wooden floors, lovely acoustics and great atmosphere,” says Danz, who is originally from Perth, Australia, and now lives just outside Glasgow.
She continues: “In some ways I’d like to have a studio set up at home but there is something about taking your work in to a studio and working with someone you trust. Things happen that might not have otherwise.”
You get the impression that working with another person was a boon for Danz in more ways than one. Piano and violin are often solitary instruments and, in the classical tradition at least, the expectation is you spend hours practising to perfection on your own. She was learning both instruments from a young age and went on to study violin at university in Australia.
Now in her late 30s, Danz says Under The World is about her time away from music, a “period of hibernation” between 2011 and 2014.
“I didn’t sing, I didn’t play, I didn’t write,” she says. “Music had been my entire life. When I wasn’t playing music I became quite reclusive. Because I had trained as a performer in the classical tradition, I was mostly trained to interpret other people’s music. It took me a long time to realise I wanted to write my own music.”
She needed the time to de-institutionalise herself from the classical regime, she says, in order to find her authentic voice, creatively and literally.
There is a predecessor to Under The World – Nightfall, a record from 2004 still available to listen to on Bandcamp. Though similarly captivating and atmospheric,
there Danz’s voice sounds more operatic, more rigid. Now, on the likes of The Falcon – a stark retelling of the Corpus Christi Carol – her vocals flow and bend like a freshwater stream.
Around 2015, Danz emerged from the shadows to travel around Scotland, Scandinavia and the Faroe Islands, performing and composing along the way while exploring sea caves, mountains and ancient churches.
“Once I came out of my own underworld it was really clear for me that I wanted to start my own music,” she says.
“I wasn’t drawn to returning to interpret the work of other composers. It felt like time to believe in myself a bit more as a songwriter and focus on that.”
The decision to step out with her own material sparked such a creative flurry that Under The World is one of three albums Danz recorded at Black Bay. One is a piano record, the other a companion piece to Under The World.
“The second album is more in the daylight,” she says, “whereas this one is all in my twilight world of me trying to find a way out of the darkness.”
All but two of Under The World’s songs are originals: The Falcon and The Demon Lover, an orchestral shanty based on a traditional ballad.
“There is more than one version of The Demon Lover, but I took these words from a book of ballads as I loved them and could hear the music to them,” Danz says.
“After I had recorded it I had this insight. For me, music feels like it’s the demon lover. It’s the thing that keeps knocking on the door. There was a time when I really wanted to walk away from it. Then I realised it’s part of me, and I can’t.”
March 14, Glad Cafe, Glasgow, 7.30pm, £5 on the door. Under The World is available as a digital release via Bandcamp jessicadanz.bandcamp.com www.jessicadanz.com
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