Andrew Tuttle, Michael Chapman

Imaginative re-workings and improvisations by Andrew Tuttle of the late great Michael Chapman's unfinished instrumental album.

Sonic explorations that bridge the Southern and Northern Hemisphere via the Caribbean, remote Northumberland and sub-tropical Australia. Navigating calm seas and turbulent waters of ambient corals, new-age pirates, waves of lapping banjos and drifting eroding guitars. In the aftermath of Chapman’s passing, his partner Andru discovered Tuttle’s Fleeting Adventure LP, describing it as “one of the albums that kept me sane during that first brutal winter on my own.” The pair met in Australia shortly after, and before Andru had even made it back home to the north of England, Tuttle had begun working on the recordings she shared with him at that time.

Those recordings were part of a project Chapman was working on at the time of his death, called Another Fish – what would have been a companion piece to his previously-released LP, simply called Fish. Though Chapman had spent time in his local studio playing all the guitars, layering the different sounds and effects, he’d always intended to do much more work on the songs, however fate had its way and he never got to ribbon-bow those ideas and bring the album to its conclusion. Though there was little intention in terms of how to finalise the project, Tuttle spent valuable time with those recordings.

What materialised, eventually - with time, care, and diligent attention - is a two-disc set: 'Another Tide, Another Fish', something both unusual and completely distinctive. The first disc, 'Another Tide', is centred on Tuttle’s own work, which shaped all seven of Michael’s songs and ideas into new songs of their own, and the second disc, which simply incorporates the recordings that Michael left behind. “On all of the tracks I also ‘played along’ on banjo to the originals several times until I learned an approximation,” Tuttle continues. “This ended up resulting in a ‘hybrid’, where some works are easily identifiable to those who know Michael’s originals, and some took that inspiration to head altogether elsewhere.

Each of the tracks, even where not obvious, does have at the very least a trace element sample of the original recordings so that it’s a true collaboration.” What we’re left with is indeed a hybrid: part remix album, part cover album, both a solo work and a collaboration, of sorts. Inspired by Chapman’s original ideas and with new track titles directly referencing the numbered but otherwise untitled source material, Tuttle adds his own flashes of colours throughout, including editing, sampling, MIDI transposing and signal processing that twists these songs into beautiful new shapes.

Perhaps Tuttle’s greatest achievement here then is that 'Another Tide' sounds so effortlessly free of all this context. Whether you know Michael’s, Andrew’s or even Andru’s story or not, these recordings will bristle with enchantment and intrigue, worlds are built, and while some thrive and grow, others fizzle out in a burst of light, such is the way. “It's been a long, long road but we got there and I think it's been more than worth it,” Andru says in the record’s liner notes. “I really hope you think the journey was worth it too.”