Group Listening

Musical collaborators for the past decade, Paul Jones and Stephen Black are together known as the woodwind-and-key-wielding, sculptural-papier-mâché-hat-wearing GROUP LISTENING.

Today, they announce details of new album Walks; their first collection of completely original compositions, set to be released 10th May on PRAH Recordings.

First single “Frogs” is shared today, with a YouTube visualiser [watch HERE].

Paul Jones takes up the story: “I was on holiday in Madeira with my girlfriend, and we went on an excursion to an area of the island on the coast near Port De Cruz.

“There was a subterranean river near there, and we heard this incredible noise emanating from under a bridge, the noise of many frogs all gathered together and croaking en masse, with this natural reverb and echo from the concreted and high sided waterway giving it a strange acoustic. Fantastic.

“I recorded the sounds with my iPhone, at the time just to capture the extraordinary sound- world they’d created. Later on I book-ended these recordings with an improvised electric harpsichord recording I’d made, and the whole thing coalesced to create the bedrock of the track. Stephen added the neoclassical-esque clarinets later, and when I was mixing and arranging the woodwind, I had as an ideal the sound and tone of a mid-century classical recording. Maybe a work by Aaron Copeland, or Symphonies of Winds by Stravinsky - a little bit astringent. A musty woodblock floored recording room, mid-sixties, tape reels steadily whirring.”

Stephen Black adds: “Frogs feels like a call to arms, a slow march where Paul and I are slowly walking, with purpose, through thick, sticky, mud. We have an army of frogs by our sides and we feel invincible.”

About Group Listening and Walks:

Following renegade reinterpretation records Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1 (2018) and Vol. 2 (2022), which pulled apart, pondered, and re-shaped cult ambient classics by the likes of Robert Wyatt, Arthur Russell and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Walks (2024) is a shining modernist monolith buried deep in the woods.

Walks draws from the field recordings of Ernest Hood; the abstraction of Harold Budd; the saxophone of Sam Gendel; the “heightened naturalism” of a Martin Parr photograph; the clarity and site-specificity of Japanese ambient, environmental & new age music of the 80s and 90s, and, prominently, Robert Walser’s pseudo-biographical novella The Walk — an appreciation of the philosophical space gifted by walks to walkers.

“Some of the places are real, while others are invented. Many of them are from actual walks that Steve and I took - mostly when on the road while touring, between shows, exploring,” says Paul Jones.

“When we first starting touring with Group Listening, both Steve and I became fascinated with going on long walks between shows, so if we had a day off we would find somewhere en route to the next show and go on a long, often aimless adventure. Sometimes we’d also take a long city walk; from Hackney to Soho in London, or an exploration of Milton Keynes, taking in its green spaces as well as its utopian modernism.”

Jones continues: “These pieces were not imagined as companion pieces to listen to while visiting a particular location (although they certainly can be used in that way), but more as a layering of notions and thoughts for places visited - redrawn as music, conjurations of feelings evoked by place. Much of the music is a celebration of random movement, of dérivistic exploration. Wandering into the drift.”

An ode to the gently psychedelic potential of wandering around in some place, any place, every place: the places in one’s own mind, Walks invites you to listen and think; to slip through the fabric of time a little or a lot, depending on how long you’ve got. Over all, to paraphrase Walser, it invites you to glow and flower yourself in the glowing, flowering present.