Our Solitary Confinement
Iceflower/Trisol TRI 151CD
Released: September 2002
Tracklisting: Dead bird • Broken greenhouse • Loading bay • Harding’s lament • Peterson’s lament • The mechanics of intuition • Fire drill • Picture of corridor • Harding’s wish • Tolson’s dream • Factory floor • Peterson’s seat • Workshop window
Use the player below to listen to a track from ‘Our Solitary Confinement’:
Buy the CD: SOLD OUT
Buy as a digital download from iTunes: 
Lyrics for this album: click here
The third Sieben album, released through the German Iceflower/Trisol label in 2002. These songs were based around the photographs of Danish photographer Kristine Haffgaard, whose pictures accompanied the lyrics in the artwork.
This was the first Sieben album without guest artists. All tracks are again played on real instruments, as with ‘The Line and the Hook’, but with a few electronics and time-stretch elements added too. It wasn’t until the next album, ‘Sex and Wildflowers’, that I started using the violin-looping technique I now constantly use.
Again, the music is wide-ranging. Less neo-folky this time, and with some modern rhythm elements. The violin is ever-present, as always, and there are some nice melancholy passages to the music. ‘Peterson’s seat’ has survived into my present day live set. Others might have, but are not loopable, because of their extended chord patterns that won’t fit in my looper.
Here’s what I wrote back in 2002:
The songs on OSC come in groups of three, separated by two short instrumental tracks. The first three tracks are ‘Dead bird’, ‘Broken greenhouse’ and ‘Loading bay’. The picture of the dead bird on a factory floor encapsulates many of the themes in OSC; work and struggle to survive, mastery of what we are, and yet we are so little—bones and strings is all we amount to. In ‘Loading bay’, the opposite. Here is where we enter the world, here the paths we choose to take. Colours as symbols here, like “days marked with a white stone”, auspicious days in Roman times. Here also death, we are “whited sepulchres”, and riches and poverty too; “born into purple, born the white-light heat of day, born in the dead-ends and ditches, born for night and its rite”. ‘Broken greenhouse’ is that brief bit in the middle, life! It examines how we live, how we fight for what we believe in, and how that affects our beliefs and the way we live our life. Can we fight for peace, can we live without fire in our bellies, does struggle in our lives make us strong, or make us destroyers? Or both?
The second set of three songs, ‘Picture of corridor’, ‘Fire drill’, and ‘The mechanics of intuition’ deal with work and art, dreams and aspirations. In ‘Fire drill’ (my favourite track on the album) two of the characters, Harding and Peterson sneak back into the factory during a fire drill, to take a break. They discuss their dreams and hopes, they smoke and take a nap, and end up burning, “their dreams smouldering up in smoke”. In ‘The mechanics of intuition’, Harding has a vision, beyond the drudgery of dull and repetitive work, of “immeasurables his eye could not account or scale, brittle thoughts he could not handle, for fear of breaking”. Music holds so much more than the mechanics that constitute it, just as in ‘Dead bird’, where we hold so much more within us than the bones that hold us up. ‘Picture of corridor’ follows up these themes; music and photography are “schemed and forged, made real by dreams. The stark and simple, diffused by light, held softly in hand, ’til taken in flight”. We have the ability to create, and be so much more than the sum of our parts, but we are also held by the need to work, to earn a living, just to survive, at the most basic level.
The last three songs are ‘Peterson’s seat’, ‘Factory floor’ and ‘Workshop window’. ‘Peterson’s seat’ is a photograph of an old chair on a deserted factory floor. Again the characters bring the scene back to life. This is the seat where Peterson sat, clocking off the workers. Now “machinery of green”, the weeds and flowers reclaim the factory after it is burnt down. Peterson foretells the closure of the factory, the work, the strain will finally stop. ‘Factory floor’ tells of that work, “this the factory floor, that shaped our lives, and warped our limbs, we weft our plans for escape”, and ‘Workshop window’ of the world outside that work; of a lover waiting on a wall outside the factory, waiting for the whistle to blow, to let out the men, to let out her man, and they can be together. Brief snippets of happiness grabbed from the drabness of existence.
This album has sold out, but is available for digital download via iTunes. I doubt I’ll be re-releasing it in solid form!
