Colin Potter/Michael Begg - Fragile Pitches

Anyone familiar with Begg and Potter’s music will recognise their output as something infinitely more demanding than background wallpaper. For the last decade, Begg has recorded and performed with Deryk Thomas as Human Greed, while Potter has been a long-standing contributor to Steven Stapleton’s Nurse With Wound project. Both outfits have roots in dark, drone-based industrial folk, with fellow travellers as diverse as David Tibet’s Current 93 project and Estonian composer Arvo Part.Fragile Pitches first came about when a member of the Unique Events team behind Edinburgh’s Hogmanay heard an album by Fovea Hex, a loose-knit project based around the other-worldly songs of Irish singer Clodagh Simonds. Both Begg and Potter are regular contributors to Fovea Hex alongside such luminaries as Brian Eno and Robert Fripp. A concert with a full band was originally mooted, but was eventually ruled out in favour of a looser, more atmospheric approach that was as much a sound installation as a performance. The only brief was that the end result should attempt to embody notions of fire, light and space. Begg and Potter met up at Potter’s London studio for a brain-storming session involving samples and found sounds. Since then, the pair have been exchanging sound files via the internet. With the piece’s title an anagram of the three words that inspired it (Fire, Space, Light), in spirit, at least, Fragile Pitches resembles some of the work produced by left-field music festival producers, Arika. Their team are responsible for the annual Instal and Kill Your Timid Notion events, as well as Resonant Spaces, which toured musicians around a set of natural landscapes with unique sound properties.

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