Joe Woodham - Worldwide Weather

NMR011

25/08/2023

Joe Woodham’s brand new album ‘Worldwide Weather’, his first solo album for None More Records, is due out just in time for the Summer Solstice 2023. A musical interpretation of how the moon interacts with our oceans and our planet through air pressure, currents and emotions, the album is a hazy, looping soundscape built around warm synths, hypnotic tape loops, cosmiche guitar, ambient washes, field recordings, folk melodies and gentle propulsion and percussive beats, searching for hidden signals in the shipping forecast.

Joe is a long time fellow in the brotherhood of Jouis, spending formative years on the road, evolving within the festival circuits and releasing two studio albums; Dojo (2014 Beetroot Records) and Mind Bahn (2019 None More Records).

The album includes first single Spring Tides, a gentle, pulsing track layered with looping guitars reminiscent of Harmonia and soaring synths over a scattered drum beat to create a lush, warm soundscape. In Syzygy is in a darker mood, with a clipped guitar providing the rhythm under eerie, exploratory synthesizer lines, a rolling bassline and ocean waves. For those keen to hear more of Joe’s talent for timeless folkish melody, Longshore Drift is an acoustic, fingerpicked guitar led tune, with an ethereal lead vocal from Joe, surrounded in gentle static. The album is bookended by Forecast and Overcast, two sister pieces which introduce and close the album’s atmospheric themes, both musically and conceptually.
Joe says of the making of the record “Writing music and compiling albums has always been a kind of conceptual audio diary for me. A way to retrospectively plot a course back through time. This latest one however came about differently. I bought a Tascam porta-studio during lockdown and started recording things purely for enjoyment. Improvising over loops, capturing the sound of the sea and blending it all together.

Worldwide Weather became my musical impression of how the moon interacts with our oceans. Air pressure, currents, emotions, the weather we live with stirs something within. More broadly too, the changing weather provides a constant for me. All change is good change. A glimmer of hope after sometimes diligently absorbing the 24hour dystopian news reel.

I needed an outlet, a way to express some kind of yearning or something. I started small by sampling my daughters Casio keyboard into a loop pedal, playing around with reversing and chopping the samples before performing an idea through my pedal board and onto cassette tape. I could then play with the tape speed on the porta-studio, add a companion layer and re-record the line out of the machine back through my pedal board again. Manually riding the reverb and delays, pitch shifting and tweaking gain on the fly. It was cathartic, performing this loop based, ambient type of music live onto cassette.

I’d listen to these recordings whilst on my window cleaning round, once the message of the improvisations had been absorbed I could overdub melodies on guitar or bass and really get deep into the theme of what was running through my head. I was listening to a lot of experimental and spiritual jazz at that time too. Hugely inspired by Polar Bear, Andrew Wasylyk, Alabaster Deplume, Francis Bebey, Joe Harvey-Whyte, Szun Waves and Pharaoh Sanders.”