When did Listening Mirror begin and what was your inspiration and influences?

Kate: Listening Mirror began in the autumn 2009. The project really developed organically from Jeff and myself beginning to collaborate. We both wanted to make music which reflects an inner connection with the sounds all around us. Bringing our separate disciplines together provided a platform from which a purely emotive, spontaneous reaction to sound and experience could be translated into music.

How did you and Kate meet, had you both been making music separately beforehand?

Kate: I was looking for a photographer to take some publicity shots for my solo music project and a mutual friend put me in touch with Jeff. We didn’t end up taking any pictures but Jeff suggested we try collaborating on a track together. The result was “Outside Heaven” and so Listening Mirror was born.

Jeff: Oh yeah! I’d completely forgotten about the photography thing!
Kate was already doing her solo project and had been in a couple of bands in the past – in fact it turned out that we had had mutual acquaintances in the past, but our paths had never crossed. Before I met Kate I was trying to reinvigorate a project that had started and finished back in the 80’s, without much success, and when I was told that Kate was a musician I suggested that we could maybe try a few things out and see where it took us. We seemed to be on exactly the same wavelength musically, and the first couple of tracks we worked on just fell together beautifully.

How do you go about creating the textures and sounds used on the tracks Resting in Aspic?

Jeff: It mainly involves me stretching and looping found and everyday sounds and then adjusting the frequencies of those sounds before layering them anything up to 10 times. Then I apply various sound treatments and production techniques to those drones until they either disintegrate or coalesce. It’s a long laborious process and is only successful about 30% of the time. Then, if necessary I’ll add field recordings If I feel the track needs it. Once that process is complete I hand the track over to Kate, who is free to add as much or as little as she likes, either vocals, guitar or synth parts. Then when we’ve both done our parts we get together and mix the tracks down over a couple of beers.

Although Resting in Aspic is a compilation of tracks released across different labels and times, did you ever envisage an album of the pieces?

Jeff: Not really. I thought those tracks were long gone, which was a shame because we were very proud of most of them.

Can you say a little about your future projects, is there anything else in the pipeline with Kate and other collaborators, some tours perhaps?

Jeff: The nature of the Listening Mirror project is a mainly collaborative one, but I still write solo stuff when I’m trying out new techniques.
Kate and I are still working on the sequel to ‘Even in The Quietest Moments’ and we are hoping to release both tracks as an album at some stage, but we’ve promised ourselves to only release it on vinyl, so it could be quite a while before it sees the light of day!

I have two other collaborations ongoing at the moment, one with Alicia Merz (birds of passage) which I’m really excited about. We worked together on a track called ‘Mixtli Sleeps’ and that went so well that we’re currently working on an album.The other is with Ian Hazeldine (Antonymes) and this is due for release later this year on Hibernate.

There are also a couple of solo things – an album called ‘What’s Wrong With Miracles?’ to be released in April on Twiceremoved Records, and a single long form piece called ‘There Are No Stars’ which will be part of Rural Colours’ compilation ‘5 Pieces’. Don’t know about tours!! Kate and I might try and take the Listening Mirror experience to a few little venues if they’ll have us, but I need to get a few rehearsals in first.

Listening Mirror’s Resting in Aspic will be released February 14th > http://store.hibernate-recs.co.uk/products/15783