During odd bits of spare time between 2005 and 2013 I was very slowly writing and recording a collection of songs with my old friend James Dexter. Back then, James had recently completed a masters degree in electronic music and was living in town, the creator of several albums-worth of electronica under the name J.Dexter. Nowadays he runs an organic farm deep in the Devon countryside and plays the melodean, that most acoustic of instruments. The Puncture Ground project, as we called it, finds James about half way along that particular musical and physical journey.
I was living in London and James was at that time living in Norwich, so we worked on the songs remotely. James would send me an initial idea for the music, I added lyrics and a vocal track and we built the songs up from there, both contributing, from the comfort of our respective homes, to the instrumentation, the editing and the production of the finished piece. I say finished piece, but in fact we never really did finish the project, we just eventually decided it was time to stop.
There are nine tracks altogether, seven songs and two instrumentals. The link below is to one of the instrumentals. I had planned to write lyrics for it, but, despite thinking it over for a period of several years, I could never come up with a single idea that fitted over the two segments of this tune. It's not without content however, and there are vocals of a kind too, towards the end, where a robin in full- throat and a herd of sheep can be found giving it their all.
James came up with the title. It's a reference to Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell. Compared to some of the other tracks in the Puncture Ground collection, Dolly's Requiem has proved quite popular. Perhaps because my singing is nowhere to be heard.