Sabbatical - Skyline

Recorded over a six year period, Sabbatical’s Sundown germinated in the cracks that separate the disparate moments of a life, and found its rhythms nursed in the openings that emerged between other projects. In those spaces – periods of exception from the flow, journeys, downtime, lacunae – Sundown waited for its creator, gathering energy, until it grew to become the centre point around which Sabbatical’s other activities would begin to orbit. A sabbatical is itself a lacuna. It is the time that is set aside. And our sabbaticals, our downtimes, long or short, are both temporal and spatial – they are often characterised by journeys, or the lack of them. We take breaks and make moves, or we stay put and cease constant movement: sacred time always demands sacred spaces, spaces within which normal rules are temporarily repealed, reversed, or augmented. Music is the magic prism that fixes such fragments of time in suspension and holds them, crystalline, up to the light so that they can be felt and understood again. And its focus can be precise: within the mirrored interior of a song, music can preserve also the locations through which time passes, or which might themselves be said to have passed through the slivers of time that music holds. And so Sundown recalls not only traces of the time in which it developed, but also the places through which this time was poured. Sabbatical’s palette seeks not to evoke but to recover and hold the glittering light on journeys to ice-fringed points north, to arrest in analogue the frequencies of evening light, to capture as reverie the marchlands where time is spent in space in such a way that their interrelationship becomes blurred (for is not a journey’s length typically measured in time and distance at once?). The earth moves around the sun – by this spatial relation we find a temporal measure – but we apprehend it perceptually as the movement of the sun around the earth, and the effort of adjusting what we perceive to what we know is similar in kind to recognising that what we had felt peripheral has secretly become the centre of our efforts. As flowers turn their faces toward the sun, so we turn toward the work that draws us, and at sundown we close our books and take our daily sabbatical of sleep.