GUEST MUSICIAN MARK DE CLIVE LOWE speaks of the inspiration for his new album Past Present (Tone Poems Across Time)

This album is a collection of personal moments and reflections. Reflections on family, reflections on the past, reflections on the present. It’s a sonic and intimate journey with my late father Robin de Clive-Lowe top of mind. A journey of discovery, catharsis and healing.

My father boarded a cargo ship and made his way from Auckland, New Zealand to Hiroshima, Japan in late 1953, a mere eight years after the atomic bomb holocaust and just one year after the US army occupation of Japan had ended. He was in the first-wave of non-military foreigners making their way to post-war Japan at a pivotal moment in Japan’s modern history as she rebuilt.

Initially there for a three month contract teaching English, he soon fell in love with the culture, the people and the country, living there for the next 20 years in Hiroshima, Kyoto and Tokyo, eventually meeting my mother and starting their family together in Kamakura before returning to New Zealand in the early 1970s.

This was a formative time in his life - the years from age 22 to 42 - and a formative time in modern Japan’s evolution, from 1953-73, which he was witnessing first-hand as he ventured around the country experiencing everything it had to offer. 

Before my father passed away in 2011 he wrote his memoirs detailing many chapters of a fascinating life, with particular detail given to his 20 years as a young man in Japan. Along with photographs from the time and letters he wrote to his family in New Zealand 70 years ago, I had a significant archive and record of these long-gone decades before I was even so much as a thought.

Thanks to the Japan US Friendship Commission, I was able to spend four months in Japan using his memoirs, letters and photos to guide me as I retraced his journey, following in his footsteps - literally in some places - and connecting with the stories he left behind.

As I undertook this pilgrimage of familial discovery and connection, I fell in love with my father. The overbearingly strict, conservative man who raised me melted away and I was able to embrace the idea of a man I never knew in person, but now know in spirit - a young man so open hearted, open minded and open spirited, with a zest for life and unbridled sense of adventure.

I only scratched the surface in those four months, but the sense of discovery and connection was profound, finding myself overwhelmed with emotions that I’d never been aware of in relation to my father - acceptance, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, peace...

It was a revelation to me and a deep embrace of a man I never knew in this way before, without whom, and without his undertaking of his journey, I simply would not exist. It was a deeply felt awakening and heart connection that words simply can’t fully capture.

In that peculiar way time has of making its own sense, before I embarked on what would become that life-altering trip, I created this music.

Over a handful of studio sessions in Los Angeles’ Pomona City, surrounded by Ken Barrientos’ exquisite collection of analog synthesizers and keyboards, I would sketch out harmony ideas and layer sounds as each piece would emerge from the textures, defining its own arrangement, dynamics and story as I would play and explore.

Nothing was over-thought and there was no particular plan in mind with the music - it was simply the opportunity to create without preconception and explore what would manifest in that space, surrounded by those beautiful instruments. From the beginning it felt personal and liberating, each musical vignette like a poem with its own wordless truth.

This is unlike any album I’ve created before, a collection of short tone poems suspended in sonic space, largely free of overt rhythmic dictation or traditional form. Harmony is the heart as fragments of melody and the sonic signatures of synths ebb and flow with their own intent.

I hesitate to call it ambient or jazz, but both those words are connected to this music in their own ways. As it was being created, I didn’t preconceive any purpose for the music, simply proceeding with trust in the process and outcome - but it wouldn’t be long until it would all make complete sense.

As I traveled around Japan over the first half of 2023, retracing my father’s journey and visiting places he’d connected with and found his own inspiration, this music was my constant soundtrack.

As my heart opened to him and my new ‘memories’ of him, extracted from stories bridging past and present, present and past, took hold, this music became intertwined with my own journey of discovery and connection that was deepening more and more each and every day.

I would record the sounds of my surroundings in places that particularly struck me - Daishoin Temple in Miyajima, the shores of Lake Biwa, overgrown paths in the depths of a Kyoto park where he once lived, forest breezes and birds in the Japanese Alps’ Kamikochi. Adding these field recordings was the final touch to tether the music directly to my experiences over those four months and more potently, to my personal process of reconnecting with my father and finding so much healing and release for my heart and spirit.

This entire process has been peculiarly akin to time travel - being guided by 70 year-old letters, photographs and the memories recalled by a man at the end of his life, and through them now finding the deepest connection and discovery in learning about a man entirely different to the one who raised me but still, the very one and the same.

Creating a body of music driven by nothing but emotional instinct and sound vibrations which, unbeknownst to me at the time, would soon after become the soundtrack to my own journey of connection and revelation. Past and present communing with each other, present and past balancing each other in the here and now, opening the door to the future.

As I share this music with you, I hope it takes you on your own journey of imagination and reflection leading to unexpected places, just as it has for me. 

With deepest love and gratitude to my father, Robin de Clive-Lowe (1931-2011)

Mark de Clive-Lowe (Tokyo, 2024)

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Mark de Clive-Lowe's album past present (tone poems across time) is released digitally and on vinyl on April 18. The album can be pre-saved at the following digital outlets here.

He has appeared at Elsewhere a number of times in the past, see here

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