Hand to Mouth: working with Keeley Forsyth

April 6th, 2025

This blog is a little look behind the scenes of Hand to Mouth, made in collaboration with vocalist and composer Keeley Forsyth.

After many years of working together as a duo, using a fold-up, portable harmonium, and later, with various expanded touring ensembles for Debris, Limbs, and The Hollow; we had long talked about returning to a collection of paired-back songs, and so Hand to Mouth represents a deliberately-lean selection of work, whilst reserving a number of songs not included on the EP exclusively for live performances.

PROCESS

Tracing

I usually trace as closely as possible, Keeley’s initial demo recordings, with whichever instrument is closest to each, usually organ/harmonium/piano, and attempt to add touches of colour only sparsely. A conscious effort is made to enhance the demos through placement alone and avoid any attempt to perfect or polish the various quirks contained in the demos as far as possible, and to the point of learning the untamed push and pull of Keeley’s own hand (especially on Run Away). This approach is a suspension of refinement, and of technique, that come automatically through conditioned learning – forfeiting these so as to tell a different story. To studiously regulate quirks of timing, harmony, or form, is the easy way out. It’s more about being with what’s already there – exploiting only those qualities that possess a resonance within the source material itself.

Ignis Fatuus

For those tracks starting out as open-ended solo piano / memorymoog pieces (Consider This, It Seems, I Have a Voice / Talk to Me), the vocal parts remain close to their first takes. For material originating from Keeley’s studio, any choices in orchestration and arrangement that accord to the first vocal takes, are ‘hung’ onto the notes themselves; and closely trace Keeley’s musical phrasing. Any subsequent vocal takes assuming a totally different character to an earlier version, are mapped onto their (unchanged) accompaniments, which speak to a now previous, illusory vocal (It Seems / Rain / Sing / Run Away).

THE SONGS

Consider This

A deliberate exercise in creating a drone from upper and lower melodic parts to give the impression of something with more harminic movement than it actually has (similar to Unravelling*, from Photograph EP). The strengths of Keeley’s ideas lie in maintaining a fixed harmonic focal point. This characteristic opens up the possibilities of how to orchestrate (or not) a drone, or a consistent series of tones, without slipping into more studied musical avenues.

It Seems

“Why can’t it just be two notes, or one chord?”

When I acquired a new piano, it took many months to get used to it – and as an exercise, set about recording an album’s-worth of music every night for a week. I needed to hear what the instrument could do from playing very singular, recognisable things (i.e., root-position major and minor chords sounded buoyant and possible on this instrument in a way that didn’t resonate as easily on the old piano), and opened up questions of pandering to any sense of melody or too much harmonic movement – preferring to settle for just one character, or texture, or harmony, or whatever. It Seems began as an eight-minute solo piano piece focusing solely on the irregular repetition created by two-handed playing of the interval of a fifth (B / F#). There was a willingness to let an indiscriminate, unsystematic way of playing the notes – letting go of trying to play something uniformly – that allowed an enjoyment of overtones and resonances for their own sake – and without habitually trying to make something else out of it.

Talk To Me

At the time of sending over a folder of incomplete memorymoog pieces (for a forthcoming album), Keeley liked this one so much it became something new immediately…

Rain

This piece began as an electronic piece by Ross Downes, with a vocal from Keeley. Working directly from Keeley’s vocal lines, the piano part was hung onto each note/phrase for both verse and chorus sections (see notation, below). Having sat on the shelf for a few years, we decided to resurrect it for this collection with a new vocal part. The resulting new vocal made the idea of refining or altering the accompaniment, irrelevant (and a further example of an arrangement corresponding to both ‘ghost’ and new vocal takes).

Anxiety

I wanted to make a piece that started from within Keeley’s musical universe – and somehow dialled in to the spirit of some of the very first demo recordings sent over to me in 2016 at the beginning of our collaborative relationship* – pieces which lead on to working with Sam Hobbs for Keeley’s debut album, Debris. If I was to compare it to any one of those, it would be How Many Knives – a piece we have performed many times in duo. Perhaps better suited to harmonium or pump organ, this is an attempt at creating another uneven, untamed mesmeric at the piano.

* (First sketch notation of demo material from 2016 – 1. One / 2. Debris / 3. untitled / 4. How Many Knives / 5. untitled / 6. Butterfly)

Sing

Sing emerged from one of Keeley’s demo recordings, but my accompaniment ventured off piste from the original, harmonically speaking – whilst still tracing the vocal, and locking into a to a fixed harmonic focal point. Also known as Creature – the final track from The Hollow – this proceeding version ends with added cellos as a kind of coda section – giving a semblance of a larger arrangement.

SCORES

I’m uneasy about fixing a whole piece – rhythms, harmonies, and various nuances – through notation, from start to finish. I love the elliptic quality of a sketch, and anything sketch-like in their appearance (e.g., Frederico Mompou / Howard Skempton / Annette Peacock / Morton Feldman et al.). With a deliberate absence of common directions and signifiers in my own notation practice, the details inevitably choose themselves, make their own way though, and settle…

Ross Downes and I hope to make these scores available as a limited-edition set of ‘pocket-sized’ cards, with the intention of providing the raw materials from which these pieces were originally conceived, for those who may be curious. Stay tuned! Below are a few more that we’ll play live, that are not included on Hand to Mouth, but will feature in the 2025 live shows.