Mara Simpson - Living Matter

Mara Simpson is a multi-instrumentalist, performing artist, songwriter, producer and composer. Her work seamlessly blends electronic, acoustic and orchestral instruments, exploring her love for tape delays, analogue synths and field recordings. Her fourth studio album Living Matter, was written and engineered in the Stroud, Gloucestershire recording studio she handwrought.

Living Matter is a unique album written in response to a set of poems by celebrated poet and fellow Stroud dweller JLM Morton published in her book Red Handed. Born out of a mutual admiration of one another's work, and a friendship fostered in wild swimming, Morton asked Simpson to come up with a live score for the performance of her and writer Emma Kernahan’s book, Glos Mythos. 

Predominantly instrumental, with passages of field recording segways and explorative sound design each of the ten tracks featured on the album is a response to a different poem in the collection. Inspired by the landscape of Mara’s Stroud home (also the birthplace of Extinction Rebellion and poet, novelist and screenwriter Laurie Lee) and its mystical history (from the area’s pre-Roman Dobunni tribe to the spirits Genii Cucullati) and water goddesses (Cuda and Sulis Minerva whom they worshipped), it explores themes of identity and artefact, memory and belonging, but most of all the brief and fleeting nature of both human and non-human existences and the futility of perceived otherness between all of us Living Matter. With a setup consisting of tape machines, analogue synths, drums, piano and strings, Living Matter draws together the signature electronic and acoustic worlds Simpson has become known for in her cross-arts compositions.