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Nomadic multi-instrumentalist and electro-acoustic visionary" Justin Grounds releases his stunning new album 'The Dissolving' this March with a tour of shows in Ireland and the UK. Grounds' own life has trodden a path as wildly romantic and unconventional as his music. Born into a family of intellectuals, priests and hippies, his musical education was unorthadox and eclectic; studying baroque violin, foraging ideas from classical sonatas to jazz/funk grooves, touring with a drum'n'bass collective and completing a degree in electro-accoustic composition. Leaving home (who knows where that ever was?) and packing his bags with a laptop, some mics and a handful of ideas, he made the 2006 record 'Francesco' on a long journey around the world, performing and recording in some of the most extraordinary places, from a Hawaiian monastary to a housing project in downtown Vancouver. The album was followed by the darker, broody 2008 record 'Love is Strong as Death', recorded in Melbourne, Australia and released on the Creative Vibes label. In keeping with his endless sense of wonderlust, Grounds toured the world with these records, playing shows across the UK, Canada, the USA and Australia, all the while developing his own unique and experimental solo stage show, building and programming his own electronic live loop setup to weave loops and layers of laptop, analog synth, and thumb piano as well as his beloved violin.  'The Dissolving' is for Grounds the culmination of this wild creative journey, both stylistically and lyrically. Settling in a tiny cottage on the windswept coast of South West Ireland, with only a small woodstove for heat and knowing no-one in the entire country, Grounds set up his studio and began to record the songs in solitude, some that had evolved sponteneously on the endless tours, and others which seemed to appear out of the ether of the bleak landscape he found himself in. It is a record which spans that paradox, with warm, ancient violin melodies being driven along by crispy electronic beats and echoes of drum'n'bass records; holy silences and landscapes of sound cut open by ecstatic crescendos of analog synths and crushed vocals. "As my life was drawn into this very organic rhythm, the tides, the fire, the chopping of the wood....in a strange way creatively I started getting drawn into the electronic side of my studio. All the time I was working on this record I was deeply seduced by the idea of combining the sheer purity, almost divine, but cold perfection of the electronic sounds with the fragmented and flawed, yet warm wooden sounds of the string instruments. Somewhere in the joining of these two sides of the spectrum came a profound and hopeful movement." Driven along by crispy drum'n'bass samples, glitchy analog synth basslines and electro-acoustic textures, the songs took shape with plucked violins and percussive pianos sent through tape delays, small fragments of thumb piano chiming and creating a harmonic structure. On top of all this music the lyrics began to shape themselves, mystical streams of song that made themselves known in the final stages of composition, as if appearing in the mist over the ocean. |
