Album Notes

Barbara started out in the visual arts with an honours degree in fine Art and Education from Reading University in the UK. She was born in Meriden and grew up in Coventry and worked as a freelance illustrator for five years, which perhaps goes a long way towards explaining why her music is very ‘visual’ in concept.

Classically trained from childhood to play the piano, Barbara gravitated to guitars in her teens whilst a spell in a folk band added mandolin, whistles, ‘in fact, any instrument she could lay her hands on, to her armory. As her interests moved further into composition, she studied sound engineering at Glasshouse Studios and music production software at the Technical College, Coventry. This gave her the knowledge she needed to set up her own studio from which she now works.

SCAPES is in an accessible, melodic, alternative classical style using a fusion of modal, folk and contemporary influences within the western classical tradition. Each track has been inspired by a landscape, seascape or spacescape. Some tracks tell a story but all are what Barbara describes as ‘painting in sound’.

She says...”For instance, in ‘Landfill Tango’ i used reversed violin bow-bounces for the buzzing fly effects and a piercing, slightly off-key melodica for the main theme, as i wanted thin and almost painful, unsympathetic sounds to describe the refuse while the middle section is about the brew of noxious fumes rising from the ground. I don’t like to explain my imagination too much though, i prefer people to ‘see’ the sound in their own way.