Portal: Making Music in Remote Places (Film)

My first introduction to the world of bicycles was when I was about three years old. My sister received a beautiful red bike as a birthday gift. So utterly distraught I was that it wasn’t mine, I kicked it over in front of the whole family, and they never let me forget it. Although possibly difficult emotions to unpack here, you could probably call this the beginning of my love for life on two wheels. From then on, it was a catalog of self-powered companions that, when I look back, capture the chapters of my life in distinct ways—from the orange mountain bike of my pre-teens to the black BMX of my teenage years and the functional hybrid commuter as I left university to the gravel bike that kept me connected to nature through the global coronavirus pandemic.

I never learnt to drive, initially because it never seemed necessary as I moved to a big city when I was 16, then, as time went on, I built up nervousness towards it because I’ve suffered from tourettes since I was a child and was worried my involuntary movements might be a little distracting on the motorway. Cut to recent years, and it seems I’ve made a commitment to sustainable travel, which has grown more visceral as factors like distance and weather have become less integral to my enjoyment of it. And now, in the present day, cycling has become an unlikely but important vessel for creativity in my life.

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Something clicked one day, when I realised cycling and cycle touring had the same, if not more opportunities for creative fulfillment that were present in my music career. If creativity is underpinned by problem-solving and innovation, then cycle touring ticks every box. It certainly buys you a lot of time for thinking and reflection, processes that tend to fall down the priority list under the pressure to create and showcase your work in an exhausting, burdensome cycle. There are enough chance encounters, improvisation, pathfinding, autonomy, and ingenuity in your own adventures to keep it feeling like a creative pursuit and not a sport.

With these themes circling around my mind, I felt like it was time to start experimenting with merging the circles of my Venn diagram of interests even further. I’d been commissioned by a record label to compose a record based on the theme of stillness, and the idea started to form quite naturally. Could I go on a journey to some of the most remote parts of the UK in search of stillness and document the adventure by recording and composing the record whilst out in the wilds, rather than through retrospective recall? I was pretty lucky to find a group of people who would help me figure that out by just doing it, and having my friend Jordan along for the ride to help with route planning, filming, and shooting photos. What proceeded was a 10-day experiment across various locations in the Scottish Highlands, recording and composing music in remote places: in caves, up mountains, beside crystal blue lochs, and in makeshift studios built in far-out bothies (stone shelters) tucked away between Scotland’s solitary highland peaks.

The equipment I’d put together for the trip was mainly focused on Teenage Engineering’s OP-XY sequencer/sampler; an incredibly powerful and expressive piece of equipment, capable of neatly tucking into a pannier bag yet offering a wealth of creative tools and possibilities for composing music quickly and on the fly. I complemented this with a ZOOM field recorder, a tiny mixer, and a powerful speaker (also built by Teenage Engineering), and housed them all in a lightweight waterproof peli-case to create a neat mobile recording studio, ready for any bothy, woodland, cave, or waterfall.

The experiment started in the Bone Caves, a series of chasms that sit on a cliff shelf, halfway up a steep limestone rockface located in Inchnadamph, about 40 miles from the far north coast of Scotland. We mostly pushed and carried our bikes laden with camping, filming, and music equipment up into the caves. There wasn’t even a breath of wind, and it felt perfectly still. No sound, people, cars, or buildings, only a few deer grazing and crows intermittently cawing as they figured out their new guests. We instantly set to work making use of the overwhelming sense of stillness. I set up some music equipment at the mouth of one of the caves, faced the speaker back into the chasm, and pumped loud oscillating drones into it. It felt like the mountain was singing out across the landscape, communicating with other geological features, its voice channeled from deep within the earth.

The following morning, we packed up and set off back down the treacherous rocky pathways, bikes clunking over every rock like overladen donkeys. The sun lit up the crisp mountain water running through the pools and waterfalls, and it looked more and more inviting as I got sweatier from the stop-start cycling, pushing, and lifting. It was a beautiful, slow morning, brewing coffee, washing in the river, and making field recordings with hydrophones (waterproof microphones) dunked in the river.

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​The next location we had in our sights was Suileag Bothy, a remote shelter on the Glencanisp Estate overlooking Suilven, one of the country’s best-known mountains. As we pushed the bikes up to the bothy, an elderly gentleman popped his head out of an opening in the stone walls and greeted us with excitement, as though he’d not seen or spoken to anybody in days. This was Tony, a retired school teacher in his early 80s, who set up camp in the bothy to fish the local lochs for trout.

It was amazing to see. He told us of a health scare that had left him with a choice: whether to fade away or live life to the fullest, so he’d packed his shopping trolley with fishing gear, bacon, and an FM Radio, and was just out in the Scottish wilderness, getting at it. After some of the rugged tracks we’d come up on the bikes, it was impressive to think of him dragging his trolley over some of those rocks. We nicknamed him Tony the Trout, and he’ll stay rooted in my mind as a reminder to keep grasping every opportunity for visceral and meaningful experiences, no matter the challenges life might throw at you. I think we could all be a little more Tony the Trout; life is for living.

​I watched the clouds roll over the cap of Suilven, which was beautifully framed in one of the bothy windows, and watched Jordan running across the fields below in search of a vantage point to film the phenomenon. It was an incredibly peaceful moment, in the presence of such power and beauty in the Scottish landscape, but standing in the silence of the bothy dorm room, with only a very faint transmission from Tony’s radio quietly coming from the next room. It wasn’t enough to disturb the peacefulness, and Radio 4 is a treasured sound for me, as it would occupy any space my Mum inhabited when I was a child, and still to this day as an adult, from the kitchen radio or sounding from the shed whilst she was gardening.

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​Luckily, we’d strapped a stack of logs and kindling to the bikes, so we set about building a fire. It was unusually hot for Scotland in the daytime, but the temperatures soon dropped in the stone dwelling as the sun disappeared, so the warmth was welcomed and only added to the cozy vibe. The music-making started with setting up the field recorder close to the fire and capturing the soft crackle and intermittent pops from the logs. When you dial in on headphones, it gives you hypersensitive hearing and a soundscape you could soak up for hours, heightened by the creak of the floorboards and the clunk of the metal latch on the wooden door. I set up my music equipment and began trying to capture the mood of the day and the serene setting of an evening in the bothy. After a few hours in the zone, we cooked up a feast of rice, grains, tinned fish, and sweetcorn and drifted off to sleep with the sound of the fire gently fading out.

​What followed was another five or so days of blissful creative adventure, moving mindfully across the varying landscapes and interacting with the flora and fauna as opposed to slicing through the countryside in a rush of rolling tyre noise and clacking hubs. Off-road cycling across rough terrain probably wouldn’t be your first thought as an appropriate vessel for composing music on the theme of stillness, and the journey came with a handful of mechanical and technical difficulties that would test us, but the gradual and intense nature of self-powered travel kept me dialled in to the tranquility of the remote highland environments, expansive mountain ranges, crystal lochs and silent ancient woodlands.

I think with composing for a theme like stillness, one could lean heavily into free-flowing arrangements, absent of rhythm, but that wasn’t my experience on this journey. Natural environments are decorated with rhythm when you really tune in, and cycle touring, as a method of travel and exploration, brings its own hypnotic, cyclical energy. Sonically, I wanted to challenge those almost ambient safety zones, explore hypnosis in the deep arpeggiating synthesizers, and convey intense moods through strong melodic themes.

You can see more from Samuel and find links to stream the album recorded in this film here.

Further Reading

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