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.

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

Now, they share brand new single “Hills End” [YouTube / streaming services].

"Steve and I were walking in and around Bolton Priory, where we must have playing a gig nearby - Leeds I think. Most likely it was on a day off between shows and we were heading north.

"We went on quite a long trek, I remember it being hilly terrain, rolling slopes and lots of gradients up and down, with the River Wharfe in full flow we passed by a place with stepping stones crossing the river.

"A number of nearby places had dramatic and gothic sounding names; the Valley Of Desolation and Storiths Crag. Hill End was on the map and close by, it encapsulated the feeling we had created in the music; that feeling you get when you set out on a a purposeful walk up a steep hill and the relief on reaching it’s end, exhausted but slightly elated." - Paul Jones on "Hills End"

"Hills End, a bit like “New Brighton”, feels futuristic to me. Like Blade Runner, or Kraftwerk but with clarinets and recorders. The tune has everything you need. Propulsive drums, arpeggiators, a wind synth and two key changes too. It reminds me of driving down a motorway but getting diverted to witness a pagan ritual with burning effigies and a maypole." - Stephen Black on "Hills End"

"Hills End" follows “New Brighton” and “Frogs”, the latter of which was praised by The Guardian for its “muted woodwind, electric harpsichord and a soothing chorus of frogs into a wistful mood fit for a vexed romance.”

Group Listening have confirmed a full UK tour for May / June in support of Walks, and have since added festival dates for July / August. All dates are on sale now.

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.