RELEASE NOTES

Flung is proud to present Sound as a Bell: collages of piano, percussion, electronics, and found sound stemming from the correspondence between sound artist Fergus Kelly and pianist John Tilbury. Through Kelly’s studio transformations of Tilbury’s recordings – where sounds are stretched, reversed, layered and refracted – the listener is left to drift in a tumbling kaleidoscope that inspires listening at once ambient, improvisatory, surreal, electroacoustic, and environmental.

Beginning in 2025, the two worked remotely from their respective home towns of Dublin and Deal, with Tilbury sending Kelly recordings of home improvisations on piano and percussion. Kelly reshaped this material through studio processing while adding his own layers of percussion, electronic sound, and field recordings, creating eight interconnected tracks in which acoustic and electronic sounds roam in a shifting labyrinth of warped reflections and resonances.

F.K. — I simply decided to have fun with the material. I took it down various avenues of processing, extending and reshaping some of John’s material into new forms and artifacts.

The album evolves approaches to memory, where fragments surface, only to dissolve again, or fold back on one another, intimate though strangely distant. There is a lingering sense that the music is taking place somewhere just beyond the limits of perception, or as if viewed through a spinning prism; time moves, bends, and breaks in cycles, echoes, and flashes, where there are no straight lines forward. The Lynchian sense of uncertain orientation is reinforced by Kelly's accompanying photography, whose ambiguous perspectives and unstable relationships between objects, surfaces and spaces mirror the music's own shifting architecture.

Sound as a Bell may initially register as ambient music, yet its intricate detail continually rewards closer attention, revealing evolving environments that unfold differently with each return. The resulting sense of time is fluid and sometimes uncanny, extending something of the expansive, knotted temporality associated with Tilbury's work with Morton Feldman into the realm of studio collage. The dreamlike sensibility of Jon Hassell, the unstable sample-based worlds of Oval and Microstoria, and the memory-haunted atmospheres of William Basinski and Graham Lambkin provide distant reference points.

J.T. — Fergus makes the best of the piano without giving it pride of place. Indeed, sometimes it seems to have disappeared. And then it emerges in lyrical mode.

The collaboration brings together two musicians whose paths first crossed in 2001, when Kelly helped to organise the one and only Dublin performance of AMM at the Project Arts Centre. Since then, their connection has continued intermittently through recordings, correspondence and mutual appreciation. Tilbury's six-decade career has made him one of the defining figures in experimental piano and free improvisation, from his work with AMM to his celebrated performances of Feldman and Cardew. Kelly has developed his own distinctive practice across electroacoustic composition, improvisation, field recording and studio-based sound art.

Sound as a Bell arrives in Tilbury’s 90th year shortly after his At Home release on Another Timbre, a substantial late-career collection that some listeners have approached as a summation of his recorded work. This new collaboration offers another perspective: Tilbury's playing enters an unfamiliar sonic context and emerges transformed, disappearing into the electronic and percussive layers before returning in sudden lyrical flashes. Kelly's process leaves space for that unpredictability, allowing the material to evolve without a predetermined destination. The result is a quietly adventurous continuation of Tilbury's restless creative spirit – a record of sounds folding back into themselves, and of a musical correspondence still very much in motion.

CREDITS

All music by Fergus Kelly and John Tilbury

Arrangement, editing, and mixing by Fergus Kelly

Recorded in Deal and Dublin

Photography by Fergus Kelly

Design and mastering by Nicholas Moroz

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