Richard Durrant
Album: Cycling Music
Label: Longman
Tracks: 10
Website: http://www.richard-durrant.com

It's interesting at times to find out what inspires or lies behind musical ideas and compositions. Musician and cycling enthusiast Richard Durrant has come up with an album of atmospheric instrumental compositions, billed as Steve Reich meets Tubular Bells meets Bradley Wiggins. It's as good a phrase as any to (a) describe Richard Durrant's rather inventive work and (b) as good a selling point as you're likely to get. With his own creative muse normally being associated with the concert guitar it's not surprising that the guitar is the focus alongside both sets of various sequencers and keyboards plus assorted 'bike sounds' at numerous points during the pieces.

Having taken himself out on tour (travelling by bike naturally) and carrying his touring package in a trailer, Durrant is certainly buying onto the concept big time - practicing what he preaches and using the time to compose in his head as he rode and then arranging and scoring his ideas before moving to the recording process. Quite a literal interpretation of being 'on the road'.

Whether the mental images which are conjured up would be quite the same to listeners who had no knowledge of the story behind the album is questionable, but having perused the CD sleeve and read about Richard Durrant, the music inevitably becomes a soundtrack to varied images of wheels, cogs, brakes and cycling tours as it plays. The enhancements by percussionist Stephen Hiscock of Ensemble Bash alongside his own drumkit, using what's termed 'the full percussive palette that is the bike frame', gives the pieces quite a unique 'bike-y feel'. The opening seven minutes of 'Gravity Bikes' encompasses much of what the album is about. An Oldfield style cornucopia of notes and rhythms with all manner of, 'that sounds like part of a bike', interjections. There's an element of reminiscence and nostalgia in 'Coventry Eagles' - the emotive bikes of his youth - and the gentle guitar of 'Ballad Of The Rusting Bikes' and all dedicated in the sleeve notes to his first five bikes and revealing an impassioned love of both cycling and music to the extent that it's hard to work out which of the two is the greater passion.

Added to the recording alongside the 6 part 'Cycling Suite' is his 2006 recording of Steve Reich's 'Electric Counterpoint'. It's a fourteen minute section which furthers the Oldfield comparisons in it's arrangements while the album closes with his solo take 'JS Bike', playing on the Eighteenth Century composition (and no prizes for guessing the composer) and turning it into a piece which matches the overall ambience of the album. "It's totally inspirational," is something which Durrant has commented upon when he talks about his passion for cycling. It almost blurs the boundaries of whether he's aiming his work at music or cycling fans but there's no doubt that the enthusiasm and zeal he has for cycling comes across strongly in 'Cycling Music'.

Mike Ainscoe