Joseph Finlay: Facets

"Returning to this music is like returning to another version of myself. Facets was dreamed up and written in 2007, when Stewart and I lived with a group of friends in a big shared house in Cricklewood. Stewart and I were young, and filled with self-assurance and self-doubt in equal measure. Post music college, Stewart had taken a job in the city; I would give him scribbled sketches and he would silently try them out in the office foyer, to the confusion of his colleagues. I had come to the end of a Masters degree in composition at a conservatoire. I was slowly losing my longstanding commitment to modernism, to the avant-garde musical techniques rooted in the serialism of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, and the later ‘total serialism’ of Stockhausen and Boulez. I was already feeling more connected to more ‘anarchic’ modernist composers, like John Cage and, in the UK, Cornelius Cardew. The ‘clownishness’ of Cage, and before him, Erik Satie, helped steer me through the staid modernism and formality of my composition department, who rarely seemed to know what to make of me. But I was already playing and writing Jazz. And I had dreams of writing pop music, of clear melodies, evocative harmonies and thick grooves. Of being a little bit, dare I admit it, cool. All of that is in Facets. It represents the musical facets of me then, the sounds that I sought to juggle and to bring into contact with one another. Stewart and I set out to create an album that was uncategorisable, that wasn’t clearly classical, despite that being the background that both of us came from, but also had feet in rock, folk, electronica and even country and western. In a slightly naïve sense we wanted it just to be music. Listening now, to this remastered version which gives it a newly contemporary sound, I note that my interests just cannot leave each other alone. The pieces designed to have ‘pop’ sound begin with simplicity and clean harmonies but frequently take unexpected diversions, taking blind alleys into layering, extended harmony and rhythmic complexity. Whereas those that are more straightforwardly ‘contemporary classical’ in style have melodies that demand to be sung, chord sequences that want to move you and references which hope to connect to your life beyond music. The clock chimes that set apart the differing sections of It’s About Time transport me back in time to the mid-2000s, when everything seemed less complicated (but almost certainly wasn’t) but also still chime in my present, collapsing time into an endless cycle of bells. Occasionally elements that were specific to the period jump out – we named the track that draws heavily on folk americana Freedom Fries – based on the temporary renaming of French fries in parts of the United States in 2003 due to France’s opposition to the Iraq war. Precise moments like that have been forgotten but the underlying subversion of national musical tropes still feels relevant. There is so much of Facets that still touches a chord with me. The joyful staccato calypso of Only Once; Fleeting Release’s cascading patterns that shift but never waver; the rich ostinatos of Wave which seem to meander purposefully towards the sea; the rich, dense quarters of It’s About Time, punctuated by the incessant sounds of the clock; the unquenchable sadness of Once More as it constantly reaches for an escape in something else; Freedom Fries which mixes patriotic certainty with inner doubt; the way Better Days transforms 2000s electric guitar licks into a world of melancholy and turmoil; and the initial simplicity of All That Glitters, where ever increasing polytonal complexity emerges as if from nowhere, ending in a patter of raindrops. All these pieces remain parts of me. Facets of a person I once was. Facets, I hope, of others too. It’s hard to be sure that the same person who wrote this music is writing this text now. It is, and it isn’t. After all, the more things change, the more they stay the same."
- Joseph Finlay, 2025