Eden Box by Neil Luck
Eden Box / Sensible Activities is an album and book co-publication by Neil Luck. It is released by and produced in collaboration with Accidental Records and Cours de Poétique. It brings together a body of work from the last two years, broadly exploring contemporary, personal, and mediated ideas around the “pastoral” and the “folkloric”, that has manifested in music, performance, writings, radio, and images. It is then an album, a score, a document, an essay, an archive, an object.
Neil Luck is a musician based in the UK. His work takes a range of forms from music-theatre, to concert works, radio, public projects and recordings, and is the founder and director of the experimental music ensemble ARCO.
Eden Box is an album of songs, dances and vérité recordings written and produced largely on the edge of a South German forest. They all play with the process of mediating, editing, and reframing raw acoustic materials, many of which were captured outside and on the hoof. The album title is a reference to the 20th century British artist of the same name (well, their pseudonym) whose naive style brought together ideas of nature, man’s place with it, and christian iconography into strange symbolist compositions.
Additional performers and collaborators: Binghi (Isheja Cheryl), Adam de la Cour, Monika Czyżyk, Margaret Luck, Chihiro Ono, Benedict Taylor, Athina Vahla.
Written, recorded, and produced by Neil Luck. Mastered by Simon Davey at The Exchange. CD artwork Kapha by Monika Czyżyk. Book and case design by Joseph Kohlmaier at Cours de Poétique. Recorded and produced at Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, EMS Stockholm, Colourscape Clapham, at home in London, and in the woods of Tonbridge.
Sensible Activities is an essay, and an illustrated book of musical-sensory exercises to be enacted alone or in groups, outdoors. They all relate to an ongoing live project of Neil’s that has manifested as a series of walks and excursions with willing participants and musicians in various countries around the world.
Several of these activities link directly with particular tracks on Eden Box; track 2 features a prototype activity offered by Athina Vahla during a nighttime walk just outside Stuttgart. Track 3 is a demonstration of leaf blowing (p. 34), and track 6 is an encrusted recording of Neil’s ensemble ARCO testing "Internal Snore Monologue" (p. 20). There are many more indirect and abstract connections, and we consider this CD and book part of the same body of work. It is all, in the end, music.
Produced and published by Cours de Poétique, whose Extended Scores series responds to the embodied, interdisciplinary, and discursive nature of contemporary music and performance practice by combining essays, documentary material, sound, and moving image with working scores in print and online.
Each copy of Sensible Activities includes access to documentation of the original performances, audio and video content, drawings, and bonus material, and a digital copy of Eden Box.