Ulysses / Cor Cordium

This unique collaborative release is the product of the best part of a decades work between the three artists.
The two compositions continue to chart the Italian group Digamma Cottage’s long abiding interest in the poetry of the Romantic movement, with the source instrumentals for both songs being recorded by them in 2013.

Side A is a collaboration with the English artist and folk-song expert Andrew King, and plays at 33 1/3rd as it consists of an 8 minute setting of Tennyson’s great meditation on old age, experience, and the ever-questing nature of the human spirit – ‘Ulysses’.
For this track, King’s vocals were recorded at Edgrey Studios in Barcelona, in late 2013-early 2014.

Side B, ‘Cor Cordium’, is a collaboration with the multi-disciplinary Italian artist AimA, based on a fragment of Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Thorne’.
AimA’s sections being recorded at her studio in Italy in 2014 with contributions from Evor Ameisie.

In 2015, King was asked to contribute additional intoned vocals to this track, but wasn’t in a position to record his parts – as well as re-editing the earlier instrumental tracks to accommodate them – until a session at Hunter Barr’s Retina II Studios in 2017, which was then followed by initial mixes of the two pieces in 2019. Subsequently AimA made a definitive mix of the B side in mid 2020, after which Hunter did a final mastering to vinyl of the two compositions in late 2020-early 2021.

In a time where recordings are often released as ephemeral downloads, it may seem strange to have bestowed so much time, effort, and expense on two discrete collaborative recordings, especially during a time of lockdown and the subsequent economic downturn, but all of the personages involved believed that these compositions deserved memorialising in a proper, tangible, form and are consequently delighted by the beautiful release that 4iB Records has bestowed on these two unique utterances. (Andrew King)

Tracklist:
A   Digamma Cottage & Andrew King - Ulysses   8:18
B   Digamma Cottage & AimA , With Andrew King - Cor Cordium   4:43

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