How has music transported you? Where do you find inspiration from the natural world? Where do you find moments of every day magic?
Erland Cooper is a Scottish composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist from Stromness, Orkney. He has released three acclaimed studio albums, four additional companion albums, and multiple EPs, including a trilogy of work inspired by his childhood home. His work combines field recordings with traditional orchestration and contemporary electronic elements. Through music words and cinematography, he explores landscape, memory, and identity. Cooper also works across mixed media projects, including installation, art, theater, and film. He is widely known for burying the only existing copy of the master tape of his first classical album in Scotland, deleting all digital files, and leaving only a treasure hunt of clues for fans and his record label alike to search for it. The tape has recently been found.

"I recently wrote a classical piece of music, and I went up to Glasgow, and we recorded this piece of work with this wonderful ensemble called Studio Collective. These fantastic musicians all gathered in one room. And I told them that once I'd put it onto the magnetic tape, I would delete all the digital copies so there only existed one copy. And all of a sudden, this piece of music, this process of creativity became incredibly precious to the people that made it. And somebody said, 'Are you going to bury it?' And I replied, 'I'm going to plant it in the earth somewhere in the Scottish Islands. And I'd like the soil over the next three years to collaborate with the music. So it's my final collaborator.' I like this idea to compose, decompose, and then recompose. So the final piece of work when it comes out of the earth will reticulate the score with the new sounds, these new artifacts of decomposition that have been created by Mother Nature. For me, it's a kind of meditation on value and patience in a world of instant gratification."

www.erlandcooper.com

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Photo by Alex Kozobolis