Impositions began life as a suite of compositions designed to bring amateur and professional performers together on stage for the purposes of improvisation. After writing a couple of charts it seemed pertinent to test how these charts might sound when performed so several were recorded as guitar quartet demos. They sounded alright but then I forgot about this project for a little while and a period of persistent low mood (PLM) really helped push it into the rear-view mirror. Soon, there were some great musicians knocking on my virtual door for remote collaborations but I found the PLM to be still obstructing my creativity and performance capabilities. To get around this, the Impositions project was exhumed and I took on the amateur guitar parts which involve the imposition of heavily restrictive but very simple rules. Things like: every five beats play one note from the whole tone scale on the top string.
Having successfully circumvented my own performance anxiety, I could now focus on composing a multitude of dumb rules to impose upon myself instead of intimidating concepts like performing in an expressive manner. The new focus became distribution of register, symmetry, serialist ideas, longform polyrhythms, and other similar concepts employed in a rather mechanical manner. Continuing in this way I recorded sundry mechanical beds of music for my collaborators to ornament in any way they saw fit, hoping that their freedom would juxtapose nicely against the restrictiveness of what underpins them.
An early and enthusiastic collaborator was woodwind extraordinaire Tony Hicks, whose skilful improvisations adorn four tracks here (Garden, Death Ritual, Usurper, and The Tide Turns Against You). Tony and I have spent some time since the conclusion of the recording of this project furthering these ideas in different contexts, discussing Cage, Reich, and Ornette Coleman, and we have improvised as a duo of woodwind and live cassette loop manipulation. We also continue to collaborate as Impositions on further remote recording projects in this vein.
Inspired by Tony's wonderful additions to the beds I was moved to ask two other admirable musicians if they would contribute. Katrina Owen and Adrian Sherriff both agreed to participate and their thoughtful musical input is included here on this album. Katrina's excellent alto saxophone work can be heard on Smothers, Loves as well as Ah Quel Tabac. Adrian's emotive, masterful, and multitudinous shakuhachi swirls are the primary feature of the concluding track, Atra.

A special thank you to Tom Redwood for the loan of a special Leslie Allan electric guitar with modular pickup system. When I began making demos for this album I simply plugged that guitar into the front of my audio interface and hit record. I later considered re-amping this guitar through an actual physical amp but in the end I didn't bother. The clean, 80s-esque guitar sound that you hear turned out to be the right sound to reflect a muted mind suffering the imposition of various downward forces.