The Spider Room is a beautiful and haunting piece of improvised music by Scottish artist Joseph Blane.
“In the summer of 2022 I *entered* an old derelict school building late at night with nothing but my electric guitar and a cheap Sony sound recorder. I was fascinated by the acoustics and the reverb of the empty music room, and the smelly rotten old musical instruments within it – covered in spiders and dust, and mostly broken or completely out-of-tune.
My only intention was to record some improvised solo guitar pieces in this cold dark abandoned building, which I did… but I also ended up messing around on the various other instruments that were lying around the room – namely an old school piano, an out-of-tune violin, an filthy Irish flute, a smelly harmonica, a cracked glockenspiel and a percussive egg. I decided that these instruments/sounds had to be recorded too… so I eventually overdubbed the existing guitar tracks with layers of improvised performances on these old neglected school instruments, and ended up with two strange pieces of music that I felt worthy of release.
The result is…interesting. I would loosely describe it as some kind of free-form avant-garde noise jazz… but I’m not a trained jazz musician so that’s probably not entirely accurate or true. The two 15-minute abstract pieces that comprise this debut album are entirely improvised, recorded in one take, and left almost completely raw and unedited – for better or for worse…”
Joseph Blane 2022
