During the lockdowns of 2020-21 Richard Pike took regular walks in Epping Forest, UK with his five-year-old son, and would return to his studio to build beds of loops around ‘skipping’ and CD glitch textures. With this raw digital material, and adding pointillist plastic softsynths, guitar and voice, Pike reaches for a trance-like state.

Literally made by taking a screwdriver to self-recorded CD-Rs, the album ‘Evergreen’ explores multi-layered micro/macro polyrhythms, inspired by experimental pioneers of CD glitch Markus Popp and Tim Hecker, as well as the emotive directions and dovetailed precision of the American Minimalists, Steve Reich and Michael Gordon.

 

Using the glitches as a base layer to guide the compositions, Pike builds fluid worlds from the scattered clicks and hiccuping grooves, a meditation on the “holding patterns” of daily existence during the time the album was made.

 

During this time, Pike fostered a daily practice of new musical explorations, and Evergreen became a statement of inner and outer worlds, of connection to family and the physics of music.

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'Evergreen' was released in 2022 on Oxtail Recordings.