James A. McDermid – Tonal Glints

“This album is dedicated to my sister, Harriet, who died in August 2016. Throughout the 2 years she was ill – leading up to her death – I had started writing music as a way to privately articulate what I was feeling. After she'd passed away, there was the question around what to do with the many tracks I had written; they had, in all honesty, been written for her. For me to perhaps leave them sitting on a hard-drive seemed a disappointing end to what amounted to, in my mind, a tribute to her. About 6 months later, I was fortunate enough to be offered a 25 track album release (titled Ghost Folk) though Canadian label, Polar Seas Recordings, in April 2017.

Her death is the worst thing that's ever happened to me; once the original shock dissipated, a wall of grief fell on me and, as a result, I found it an almost impossible task seeing my world in quite the same way as I once had. The wear and tear of life became suffocating, so I continued with the idea of channeling what I was feeling, into music; however, coming to terms with Harriet's death, rather than her illness, started to cloud and confuse what I was doing. In the end, it was Sophie Calle's book Exquisite Pain – a book arguably about grief in its various forms – that provided me with the clarity I needed. Calle's writing – in particular the people in it trying to come to terms with their own similar tragedies – helped shape and direct my own thoughts; Exquisite Pain acted as a conduit for what I was both feeling and trying to convey. Tonal Glints is the end result.” – James A. McDermid