Available to listen to and buy at Bandcamp
Release date: 15 August 2025
Format: digital download. Artwork and typography by Landschaft.
The Gainsborough Trough: ...is a geological formation in the strata below Gainsborough in North Nottinghamshire. My interest in this was stimulated having read 'Geology in the Country Around East Retford', HMSO, 1973. An extensive deposit of limestone was formed in the Trough, below the Millstone Grit and Coal Measures in a structural depression (graben) geologists speculate was formed by sub sea subsidence and faulting in the late Carboniferous and Early Permian. In the following Late Permian, later in Geological time, the Zechstein Sea formed and global sea levels rose inundating what is now Northern Europe (which when flooded, deposied marine and evaporite minerals in the Trough). Together (in the language of petroleum geoscience) a combination of 'source' deposits, 'traps', 'seals' and 'reservoirs' in and around the boundries of the Trough made and channeled hydrocarbons formed from carboniferous rocks, thus resulting in what is now the North Nottinghamshire sector of the East Midlands Petroleum Province. Read 'Petroleum Geoscience' by Jon Gluyas and Richard Swarbrick, Blackwell Publishing 2004 if this condensed summary interests you!
So to my two pieces, the first, a ponderous and dark metaphor of geological time and the steady accumulation and transformation of mineral deposits. The second, what I describe as a planar work; again a metaphor for the layering of rock types laid down by the forces of nature. My interest in the geology of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire dovetails with my exploration of the economic and social factors which fuelled the Industrial Revolution and the shaping of the surface landscape driven by the availability of raw materials, first coal, and later oil and gas, and the emotive prospect of fracking of the shales in the Trough to yield anticipated petroleum reserves. Which in our more enlightened times may never take place, superseded by surface mounted solar and wind energy catchers [both of which are really just a shortcut from sun to energy, circumventing the geological transformation of biological material over millions of years], and which among other purposing are likely to fuel the new Industrial Revolution of AI driven by data centres. There is an interesting paper published in 2018 by the 'Basin Research Group' jointly by Imperial Colledge London, Energy PLC and Schlumberger when the fracking debate was warming up, and was not the done deal it appears to be in 2025. It is perhaps the best graphical representation of the Trough - and some astonishing estimates of hydrocarbons in place - 18 billion barrels of oil and 25 tcf of gas, in what it terms euphemistcally 'unconventional petroleum potential' in the Bowland Slate of the Province.
My piece 'The Gainsborough Trough' is an amalgamation of generative modulation (supplied mainly by Instruo Ochd) of 2x Moog Mother 32s, a Moog Subharmonicon and a new voice I have acquired, Weather Drones by EoWave. MIDI triggers were supplied via Cubase from fractal applications, providing the tonal backbone. Underlying is a layer of choral origin supplied by the excellent Slate and Ash Landforms. I ran some of the mono audio stream through 1st Order Binaural spatialisation, downmixing to conventional stereo. Piece two, 'Graben' is a simpler work, formed from the same Landforms patch, again tonally evolved via fractal/generative MIDI applications. The endless possibilities of hardware modular continue to fascinate me, and I will introduce new elements as I learn their properties and potential.