Simon Waldram - Songs without Words

Simon Waldram hails from Mansfield, in Nottinghamshire, in the United Kingdom. In other releases, he writes conventional rock and acoustic pieces, featuring Simon singing intelligent lyrics. At Negative Sound Institute, we love a good conventional song, but we particularly believe in the lyrical beauty of "Songs without Words". Simon Waldram's new release is, pleasingly, entitled just that "Songs without Words".

Perhaps jazz music best exemplifies the lyrical nature of instrumental music, as the instrumental solos "stand in' for actual singers. Yet the jazz spirit is not bound to a single genre--as in the truism, the definition of jazz is that it defies definition. In "Songs without Words", Mr. Waldram makes music in which he uses his Les Paul Epiphone replica guitar to visit places usually visited by synthesizers and sequencers. The music ranges from the slow-drive tones of "Elements" to the gentle ambience of "Elegy" and "Rowing Toward Hope" (the latter is a collaboration with Gurdonark).

The old song posited a kind of meaninglessness in songs that "ain't got that swing". We posit instead that the meaning in music involves taking the old beats and the old swings and putting them into songs without words. The lyrics are in the sounds of a gently pulsing guitar.

What are the things we say when we write instrumental songs? They cannot be written out as one sentence, or even as one page. The song's "speaker" and its listeners hear different words. In "Songs without Words" Simon Waldram provides a rich palette of paints for the listener to use to fingerpaint her or his own destiny and story. Too often music is described as "experimental" or "abstract', but in the release of "Songs without Words', let us praise music which helps the listener find her or her own narrative in its sounds.

Individual 128kbps Downloads:

Houston Sunday
Endless Blue
Rowing Towards Hope
Elements
Maybe We're Almost Home
Letter to Orkney
Elegy
Displacement
Only This Moment
Waves
The Brightest Light
Memories of a Storm
The Bird That Flew Halfway Across the Ocean
Wandering Spirits-Houston Monday