\[Realises this is not the best road to go down and smoothly shifts the topic to books\] **I’m reading a really nice book at the moment.** **A book published last year by a writer from London called *Grief Is The Thing With Feathers*. Max Porter, *Grief Is The Thing With Feathers*. The title borrows from Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is a thing with feathers”. It’s about grief, of course. It’s great, dark, sad and funny.** **I was in a bookstore recently and I just read two pages in the bookstore and it was really easy to read and it was so funny, I just bought it as it was so odd and I knew straight away, this is something… it’s really good. And that’s what I’ve been doing this week.** **The writer is a clever human.** Plenty of them. That’s nice. \[Pause. Distant chatter holding no value as no words are heard. Clang.\] **I listened to your new record. Which is really nice. The voice one. Which was recorded in…** \[Clicks fingers\] The Brunel tunnel shaft. **Brunal what?** The shaft of the Brunel tunnel. It’s a large metal cylindrical structure and by its own weight sunk into the ground. And by doing so it allowed Brunel to begin the process of digging, underwater. And yeah it’s got a museum there, a little shop where they sell books about Brunel and the 1800’s, and… Oh, it’s the spliff! **Yeah.** Oh great! Cool. **And so how did you get access there? To record in there?** \[Inhales\] Well I just approached them. There was a woman whose name I can’t remember right now and she was putting on little concerts there at the time, in 2013, and the first thing I did there was an album launch and commemoration for the six men who died during the construction of the tunnel. They drowned to death. **Which album launch?** Anything brighter starting… anything bright or startling? And then after that I went back – whoops! \[Hands back spliff but it rolls off the table. Laughter\] I went back and in exchange for some voluntary work in the bookshop and museum I got access to the shaft, so it turned into a type of residency. **Ah, OK. Was that after hours? When they let you in?** Various times. It was a really nice setup. I lived quite close, so it was just a matter of getting in through this tiny metal door. It was about a metre in length. So for people to get access to the shaft, you had to crouch down and go through this tiny door and then down a scaffolding staircase. **Alice in Wonderland style. So how big is it inside?** The shaft itself is 50 feet underground and it’s 14 feet above the trains and it had this square window, which is not there anymore, they put these new stairs in quite recently and closed up the hole. It’s quite different now but at the time there was a square window on the ceiling which would let another feed of sound into the [space.It](http://space.It) was really nice. Then there were all these other things making sounds at random intervals, the pump was still there, making sounds. **Mechanised sounds?** Yeah, kind of breathy sounds at times and machine-like at times. **When was this?** I started visiting towards the end 2013, 2014 and in 2015, I recorded during the summer solstice. **But there’s harp on that recording as well, so you were able to take that into the space?** At one time I tried to take the larger harp which was a bit of an ordeal, I needed others to help, but I have a smaller harp which can fit in when you turn it sideways and then just push it in and follow in yourself. A lot of the time I played with all the lights off so you just get the shadows of light coming in from the ceiling window on the top of the shaft where there’s a beautiful garden. At the time I lived in a room with no windows, so the space reminded me of this cave-like feeling, only it sounded much better acoustically. In 2014