It’s been a busy year, with various non-airsculpture music projects and those bits of life that aren't music. Airsculpture hasn’t taken a back seat, we played a concert at the Awakenings series in spring and have been getting things ready that won’t pay off until 2020. But there was a serious risk that we would reach the end of the year without a musical release. There have been gaps before, especially when the Neu Harmony label wound down, and it doesn’t really mean anything but it doesn’t feel comfortable.

We do have plans and there are new releases in the pipeline but not really ready to push the button on. So we explored our available recordings and we’re releasing “Metal Adjacent”. This is taken from a recording and rehearsal session in March 2019, preparing for the awakenings gig. It’s a gentle amble through interleaved textures and tone - a very recognisable AS intro piece closed with a brief sequencer section,

This session took place in a rehearsal studio on Greenham Common, famous and infamous for being the home of cruise missiles at the tail end of the cold war, along with the peace women protesting against them. More recently the disused berms that hid and protected aircraft can be seen doing the same job for rebel starfighters in the Star Wars universe. We’ve used this location on and off for a while; this time we arrived to find it disused and overgrown. After a frantic period of web searching and fruitless driving we eventually found the new building that they’d neglected to tell us about.

Unfortunately this new building didn’t seem to be quite as sound insulated as we might have hoped, and our neighbours were a very, very loud rock band. We can hold our own on the volume stakes at times, but trying to balance softer ambient sounds can be a bit tricky when the walls are coming down around you. So not the most successful session ever, but we did manage to record this half hour section. The short sequenced passage cuts off dead, probably when we hit stop in frustration.

We’re making this album available as a free download. Technically you can pay what you want and if you were to throw a few coins in the virtual tip jar we wouldn’t complain, but we really don’t expect it. If you do want to throw some money around, a better recipient is Readings homeless charity Launchpad: www.justgiving.com/launchpadreading