Warwick Bazaar has for over two years been a second recording home for the artists at TOR. The start of 2017 saw it as the location for sessions for a new Nightowl sings EP. Myself, David Thompson, Jill Wallace, Jessica Lowes and Chloe Lee Maitland were present to aid the newest batch of songs from Marc Gillen.

Spirits of the Old and New World: Everything connects - the fault lines intersect. No matter where you start, you are always stuck in the web of history, adrift in the network of circumstance, lost in memory and the whispered past.

The sessions usually finished an early nine o'clock and Marc and the guests would leave. Jill, David and I would stay on; drinking, talking, smoking and sometimes playing.

In modern Amsterdam, dodging bicycles, you can feel the pull of History and Art. The patience of Rembrandt is lit by candles in shrinking, soundless, haunted rooms while the fever of Van Gogh is drenched in fierce sunlight, a colour that never was, that never existed outside his carnivorous imagination.

On the first and seventh day of February we stayed late and improvised. We were all dealing with major downers and the sessions could be clouded by a dark fug, the late night improvisations proved both an anti-dote and cathartic release.

Here, Space is narrow and tall, clenched and nervous from climbing up small, cramped stairwells. It is a city of international ghosts and vertical dwellings. Brisk horses clip-clop on cobbles and make way for the bells that warn Anne Frank to stay in the attic. Otherwise the tourists will track her down, and her story will be subsumed by static. Yellow stars stare from a black and white time – evil exists without logic or rhyme.

Both sessions were hours long, swapping instruments and sometimes bashing away with no real idea, direction or sense. Every now and again, we would somehow fall into something and it worked, purely by accident.

Was lack of space and the flatness of the land, forever expecting to be lost to the waters, the reason the Dutch went looking elsewhere, for places to name and space to spare.

These sessions were recorded and I put them to one side, where they would wait.

And so New Netherland predated New England and old New York was once New Amsterdam. Boston is eating clam chowder, watching the Red Sox and hunting humpback whales. The city is walkable and civilised, though rocked by Irish devilment. On the hill where gravestones whisper, visitors from Britain and France and Japan take photos of the fallen, petrified by History. We are the phantom chamber quartet, playing you back into sight and mind. We have waited for you for the strangest and most faithful time. We see all those patriots in the falling leaves, scrabbling for Liberty - hungry and honest and true.

David visited Amsterdam and several states in America in 2017. I asked him to collect as many field recordings as he could. I had been recording sounds around the shop and on adventures out and wanted a bank of found sound to add to a project that was starting to develop.

A Yankee call to arms becomes a Rebel Yell and we jump on the Mystery Train, bound for Memphis. Down south, the past becomes a Blues song, wounded and wailing, and a country tune also, with ants in its pants, guzzling moonshine and itching for a fight. There’s a distant train whistle and soon the blues has a beat behind it, a swing in its step. And the city is lazy and easy, with aimless, broad avenues and vanished streetcars and music pounding in the dim-lit bars. Johnny Cash is playing on the haunted jukebox at Earnestine and Hazel’s, where Ray Charles and Chuck Berry caroused when rock and roll was still young. So order a Soul Burger, since it’s the only thing on the menu, and walk around upstairs, spirits at your elbow evaporating with every backward look. And the Memphis Queen is moving down the murky Mississippi, with ghosts in the shadows the ancient trees make and a hundred old shoes lost in the gumbo mud.

On the twelve of May this year, I asked Jill and David to my home for a recording session. Jill manipulated a radio broadcast performance and David affected several drone tracks. We added these to the collection of field recordings made in Amsterdam, the jam sessions from the first of February and performed a the 'Amsterdam' collage.

And back to New York, which is no longer New Amsterdam.

For the 'America' collage, we assembled at Warwick Bazaar on the seventh of July. This time I conducted a drone performance by Jill and David and we added to this to the jams recorded on the eighth of February the previous year and the remaining field recordings.

Both collages were performed once and those are the versions on the sides of this cassette.

Third time lucky - the Village is a benign labyrinth and Zoltar speaks the future at Coney Island.

Maybe. - Stephen Benson and David Thompson.