EDEN BOX / SENSIBLE ACTIVITES
N E I L L U C K
Released July 12th 2024
Accidental Records AC210CD & Cours de Poétique
EDEN BOX / SENSIBLE ACTIVITIES is an album and book co-publication by Neil Luck.
It is released by and produced in collaboration with Accidental records and Cours de Poétique.
It brings together a body of work broadly exploring contemporary, personal, and mediated ideas around the “pastoral” and the “folkloric”, that has manifested in music, performance, writings, radio, and images.
EDEN BOX / SENSIBLE ACTIVITIES is then an album, a score, a document, an essay, an archive, an object.
EDEN BOX...
...is an album of songs, dances and vérité recordings written and produced largely on the edge of a South German forest. They all play with the process of mediating, editing, and reframing raw acoustic materials, many of which were captured outside and on the hoof. The album title is a reference to the 20th century British artist of the same name (well, their pseudonym) whose naive style brought together ideas of nature, man’s place with it, and christian iconography into strange symbolist compositions.
In contrast to Neil’s previous releases Eden Box is a set of wildly varying tracks; agnostic in style but with a through-line of disrupting expectations.
Additional performers and collaborators: Binghi (Isheja Cheryl), Adam de la Cour, Monika Czyżyk, Margaret Luck, Chihiro Ono, Benedict Taylor, Athina Vahla
Reviews:
"Eden Box embodies a playful way of interacting with what’s around. It’s so successful because it gleefully embraces a sense that experiencing our environment entails aiming at a moving target from an unstable platform. On Eden Box, the whole world is a curious stranger." The Quietus
"Neil Luck cadges cues from the naif, stylised, religious paintings of Eden Box for a properly guess-again, switch ’n bait album perfectly suited to Herbert’s misfit label with its playful approach to concrète derangement. Recorded on the edge of a forest in southern Germany, it pulls the imagination all directions without sounding a mess". Boomkat
SENSIBLE ACTIVITIES...
...is an essay, and an illustrated book of musical-sensory exercises to be enacted alone or in groups, outdoors. They all relate to an ongoing live project of Neil’s that has manifested as a series of walks and excursions with willing participants and musicians in various countries around the world. Several of these activities link directly with particular tracks on EDEN BOX; track 2 features a prototype activity offered by Athina Vahla during a nighttime walk just outside Stuttgart. Track 3 is a demonstration of leaf blowing (p. 34), and track 6 is an encrusted recording of Neil’s ensemble ARCO testing ‘Internal Snore Monologue’ (p. 20). There are many more indirect and abstract connections, and we consider this CD and book part of the same body of work. It is all, in the end, music.
Produced and published by Cours de Poétique
Cours de Poétique’s Extended Scores series responds to the embodied, interdisciplinary, and discursive nature of contemporary music and performance practice by combining essays, documentary material, sound, and moving image with working scores in print
and online. Each copy of Sensible Activities includes access to documentation of the original performances, audio and video content, drawings, and bonus material, and a digital copy of Eden Box.
Images from the recording of EDEN BOX
