The release of ‘Archipelago: Source Materials’ (21st Oct) follows Hidden Orchestra’s ‘Reorchestrations’, ‘Wingbeats’, ‘Dawn Chorus’ and ‘Dawn Chorus Remixes’, which featured reworkings from Max Cooper, Throwing Snow, Wrongtom, Matthew Herbert, Nostalgia 77 and more. An avid live touring band, Hidden Orchestra have played live shows in over thirty countries, immortalising their performance at Brighton’s Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts on their 2019 live release. Alongside these releases, Hidden Orchestra have been commissioned to put together projects and installations around the world, including selected recordings for Kew Gardens, the British Library and National Trust. Recent years have also seen the completion of Joe Acheson’s soundtrack for the Amanita Design game Creaks. Five years in the making, Acheson developed a way of using AI to create instrumental music that would be different every time you heard it and could play infinitely. As a result, the Creaks soundtrack was released as a conventional album as well as an innovative dynamic music app.
During the pandemic, Acheson set about recording an album with Cerys Matthews, marrying their mutual love of music and poetry. “Cerys had put together a phenomenal collection of poems from ten of the country’s foremost contemporary poets, recorded them at Abbey Road, and had conceived an overall album project”, he explains. “The pandemic then struck, so I took the suggestions from Cerys and created music for each poem, using my archive of field recordings, and new instrumental recordings”. The result was ‘We Come From The Sun’; a cohesive flowing album with a strong narrative arc and overall structure.
