Simon Gottlieb

Not Long Now

There's a new record on the way this September, and for the first time in a while I'm finding it hard to stay quiet about something before it's actually ready. I don't want to say too much yet. Only that it feels like it grew directly out of where Transcendence left off, and that it might be the one I'm most nervous to finally share.

I'll write more here the moment there's something proper to say, probably sooner than makes sense given how unfinished it still is. If you'd like to hear about it first, or just want to say hello in the meantime, my inbox is always open. It means more than you'd think to hear from someone who's actually been listening.

Finding the Right Frequency

What stayed with me, a month later, is a changed sense of what "connecting" with a listener even means. Not persuasion. Resonance, finding the frequency where their attention and the work naturally agree to vibrate together, rather than pushing the work at them and hoping something lands.

It's made me a more patient composer. I wait longer now for the right frequency instead of forcing a phrase to be interesting. And it's made me a slightly more patient person generally, less inclined to push, more willing to find the note where two things already agree.

If this record does anything for someone else's life beyond the forty minutes it takes to hear it, I'd hope it's that patience, borrowed quietly, the way all the best lessons in this practice get borrowed, sideways, without announcing themselves.

Behind Frequencies

I wanted to write about vibration itself this time, underneath melody, underneath even the sine wave I'd already spent a whole record on. Every sound is a frequency before it's anything else, before it's sad or bright or "modern classical." I got interested in what's left if you strip a phrase back to that fact and build up from there instead of down from feeling.

There's a metaphysical thread I can't fully explain but won't disown either: the sense that a frequency is a kind of address, a way two things, a string and a room, a player and a listener, agree to resonate together for a while. Cymatics, the patterns sound makes visible in sand or water, kept coming to mind while I worked. Geometry, made by vibration, made by nothing more mysterious than air moving correctly.

I don't think I resolved the question. I think I got close enough to it that the not resolving became the record.

Keeping the Proportion

A month out, this is the record I keep returning to when I think about what "becoming a better person" through the work actually means in practice. It's not dramatic. It's proportion, making sure the size of my reaction to something matches the size of the thing, in music and in the rest of it.

I catch myself checking that ratio now in ordinary moments that have nothing to do with piano & cello. Whether I'm giving something the attention its actual scale deserves, no more, no less.

If a listener takes one thing from this record, I'd want it to be that same check, quietly installed, a sense of right proportion they can carry back into whatever their own life is asking of them. That's the closest thing I have to a purpose statement, and I only found the words for it after the record was finished.

Behind Golden Ratio

Phi again. I'd been avoiding it as a title for years because it felt too on the nose for someone who talks about sacred geometry as much as I do. Eventually I stopped avoiding it and just let the record be exactly as literal as the title suggests.

What drew me back was proportion in the natural sense: the spiral of a shell, the branching of a fern, growth that keeps the same relationship to itself at every scale. I wanted a phrase that could be played small in one register and large in another and still sound like the same idea, just further along its own spiral.

Owed to Debussy for proving proportion could be felt rather than counted. Owed to Mompou for proving it could be plain. I don't think I fully earned the title until the last third of the record, when the shape finally started repeating itself the way I'd been hoping it would from the beginning.

The Wall That Came Down

The lasting change, a month on: I no longer think of solitude as a requirement for honesty in this work. I thought it was, for years, that clarity needed an empty room. This record proved the room can hold another person and the clarity survives, sometimes sharper for the company.

It's changed how I think about serving a listener too. I used to imagine one person alone with the record, and write only for that. Now I think about the record as one more collaborator in someone's day, sitting alongside whatever they're carrying, not replacing their own thinking but keeping company with it.

Becoming better at this, for me, keeps meaning the same small thing each time: fewer walls between the work and whoever needs it. This record took one wall down that I didn't know I'd built. I'm better for not having it.

Kinder to the Old Sketches

A month later, the honest answer: this record made me kinder to my earlier work, and by extension kinder to my earlier self. I used to hear an old sketch and cringe. Now I hear a question that hadn't finished being asked yet, which is a completely different feeling to sit with.

That shift has quietly followed me off the record. I'm slower to discard a half formed idea now, in music and otherwise. I give things longer to become what they're for.

If this one serves the listener at all, I'd hope it's in that permission: that an old, unfinished part of yourself isn't a failure waiting to be corrected, just a phrase that hasn't been paraphrased yet. Say it again, differently, and see what it actually meant. That's the whole practice, on the page and off it.

Behind Collaborations

This is the one where I let other hands into a process I usually keep sealed. Uncomfortable, at first. The quiet room is mine, and I'm particular about who else is in it. But I'd been circling a question I couldn't answer alone: whether the geometry I hear in a phrase is really there, or just something I project onto it because I'm used to working by myself.

Another player in the room answers that question fast. Either the shape holds under a second set of hands, or it was only ever a private habit dressed up as structure.

Most of it held. Some of it didn't, and I'm glad it didn't. The parts that broke taught me more than the parts that survived. Play it low. It was still made low, even with two of us in the room.

Behind Paraphrases

I went back into old sketchbooks for this one, phrases I'd written years ago and abandoned, not because they failed but because I didn't understand them yet. A paraphrase says the same thing in different words. I wanted to say the same thing in a different self.

It's an odd kind of conversation, sitting across from who you were. Some phrases I barely touched. They'd been right the whole time, waiting. Others I rebuilt from the ground while keeping only the original question intact.

There's a geometry to that too, if you look for it: the same proportion, redrawn at a different scale, still recognisably itself. I think that's closer to what growth actually looks like than the story we usually tell about it, where the old self gets discarded. Mine just got translated.

A Light That Stayed

The lesson this one left me with: attention itself is a kind of light, and I'd been treating it as scenery instead of source. Since finishing this record I write differently, less trying to illuminate the listener from outside with clever gestures, more trying to give their own attention something worth glowing around.

It's a subtle reorientation but it touches everything, including how I want to live off the page. I'd rather be a small, steady, self generated light than a large borrowed one. That's not humility exactly. It's closer to sacred geometry again, the idea that a contained, honest radius does more real work than an uncontained one ever could.

I think this is the record where I stopped trying to impress anyone's dark and started just trying to be a reliable, quiet glow in it.

The Curve That Stayed

This record changed my relationship to restraint. I used to think restraint meant leaving things out for effect. Making *Sinusoids* taught me it can mean something closer to reverence, leaving things out because the bare shape underneath deserves to be heard on its own terms, undecorated.

A month out, I notice I trust silence more than I did. Not silence as absence, but silence as the space the curve needs to be legible in. That's carried into how I listen to other people, honestly. I interrupt less.

If there's a purpose I'd want this record to serve for someone else, it's that: a permission to stop decorating your own signal and just let its actual shape be heard, by yourself first. That's the whole of what a sine wave taught a piano player. It took forty some minutes of music to say something a textbook says in one line.

Behind Luminescence

Light, again. It always comes back to light with me, and I've stopped apologising for that. This time I wanted a light that comes from inside the thing rather than falling on it from outside. Luminescence, not illumination. The distinction matters more than it sounds like it should.

I thought about creatures that generate their own glow in total dark, and about the geometry of that: a small, contained radius of visibility, self sufficient, not competing with any other source. That felt closer to how the piano & cello should sit in a quiet room than any note about "atmosphere" I'd written before.

Made small, on purpose, but lit from within rather than from the room around it. I wanted a listener to feel like the light was theirs, generated by their own attention, not borrowed from mine.

Behind Sinusoids

Same week as *Luminescence*, a different argument entirely. This one started with the sine wave itself, the purest tone there is, a single unbroken curve with no attack, no decay, nothing hiding in it. I got obsessed with the idea that this shape, this exact mathematics, is underneath every sound I've ever loved, however complicated the surface gets.

There's something close to devotional in that, for me. Underneath the counterpoint, underneath the piano & cello, underneath all the deliberate imperfection I usually favour, one clean curve, repeating, patient, indifferent to whether anyone's listening. I wanted to write toward that instead of away from it for once. Fewer ornaments than I usually allow myself. More trust in the bare curve.

It felt less like composing and more like uncovering something that was already there before I sat down. Which is probably the most honest way I can describe what sacred geometry means to me in practice, rather than as a word I use in interviews.

Written Since Transcendence

A month later, I can say plainly what I couldn't say while making it: this is the record that changed what I think an album is for. Not an object. A room I build so someone else can put something down in it, a weight they've been carrying, a question they haven't asked out loud.

I don't think I became a better composer because of *Transcendence*. I think I became a slightly better person, which is the only kind of "better" that ever actually shows up in the next record. The catalogue keeps arguing the same case, one release at a time, and this is the one where I stopped writing toward my own resolution and started writing toward the listener's.

That's the whole shift. Small on the page, large in practice. If it opened even one door for one listener toward whatever their own quiet is for, the eleven minutes did their job.

Behind Transcendence

I resisted this title for months. It felt too large a word for piano & cello in a small room. But every other title I tried was a smaller lie, so I kept it and tried to earn it instead of avoiding it.

What I mean by transcendence isn't escape. It's closer to what sacred geometry points at when a spiral opens outward without ever leaving its own centre: you go further out precisely by staying anchored to what you already are. The record is the most contrapuntal thing I've made, two voices that keep circling the same idea from further away each time, never abandoning it.

I wrote most of it after *Curves* and *Golden Ratio*, and I think it's the record where those two arguments finally met, proportion and softness agreeing at last. Owed, again, to Satie, to Debussy, to Mompou's patience, to Harold Budd's refusal to hurry. The rest I took by accident, the way you always do when you've been listening long enough.

The Shadow It Left

Since finishing this one, I keep asking a different question before I write anything: what am I casting a shadow of, and have I positioned the light honestly? It sounds abstract. In practice it's made me cut more than I used to, anything that felt like decoration rather than source.

I think this is what people mean when they say a record changes you. Not dramatically. It just leaves a new filter installed, quietly, and you don't notice it operating until you catch yourself using it on something unrelated to music. I've started applying the same test to how I spend a day. Is this the source, or noise around the source.

I'm not sure that's a lesson an audience needs to know about. But it's the honest answer to how it changed me.

Behind Projections

The title came before the music, which almost never happens. I'd been reading about projection in the geometric sense: how a three-dimensional form casts a two-dimensional shadow, and how the shadow is real but incomplete, a true partial account of something larger than itself. I thought, that's what a recording is. Not the music. A shadow the music casts into a room.

So I wrote toward the shadow instead of the source. Simpler lines than I'm used to, because a projection loses detail on purpose, and that's what makes it legible. Erik Satie understood this decades before I got anywhere near it, and so did the quiet school that came after him. I'm not claiming their clarity. I'm saying I finally understood what they were reaching for.

There's a metaphysical comfort in it, if I'm honest. If the record is only ever a shadow, I don't have to get the whole form right. I just have to point the light correctly.

What the Pulse Taught Me

A month on, the thing I notice is how much quieter my hands got. *Rhythmicity* taught me that a pulse doesn't need volume to be felt. It needs consistency, the way a good habit needs consistency more than intensity. I've carried that off the record and into the rest of my life, oddly. I became slightly more patient. Slightly less interested in the dramatic gesture.

I used to think a composer's job was to say something. Making this record, I started to suspect the job is closer to keeping time for someone else's becoming: holding a steady pulse so a listener has something honest to walk beside while they work out whatever they're working out. That's not a small shift. It rearranged what I think music is for.

Made small, on purpose. But the smallness is doing more work than it looks like it's doing.

Behind Rhythmicity

Every album starts as a question I can't say out loud yet, and this one started with a pulse. My own, at four in the morning, loud enough in the quiet room that I began playing along with it instead of against it. I'd spent years treating rhythm as something to resolve, the way you resolve a chord. *Rhythmicity* asked what happens if you don't resolve it, if you let the pulse stay a pulse.

Sacred geometry keeps circling back to this idea for me: a spiral is just a circle that refused to close, and growth is rhythm with memory. I wanted the piano & cello to breathe like that, never quite repeating, never quite new. Counterpoint learned from the body, not the page.

I'm not trying to describe a heartbeat. I'm trying to remember that I have one, and that the listener does too, and that for eleven minutes we might share it without either of us mentioning it.

Where It Actually Started

This is the record that actually started everything else, in hindsight, though I didn't know it at the time. Every album since has been some version of the same argument *Curves* first made: that the indirect path is usually the truer one, in a phrase and out of it.

I became a slower composer after this. Slower, and I'd like to think, slightly better company for it, less interested in tidy endings for other people's questions too, more willing to let something take the curved route to wherever it's actually going.

If I've built anything like a purpose across this catalogue, it was laid down here first, without my noticing: music that doesn't resolve for you, but sits beside you while you find your own way to whatever you're actually working toward. That's not a small thing to have discovered by accident, at an odd hour, four records before I could name it.

Behind Curves

The oldest record here in spirit, though not chronologically first for me. It started with a plain observation: nothing in sacred geometry that matters is actually a straight line. The spiral, the vesica, the arc of a golden rectangle, all curved, all patient, none of them in a hurry to arrive anywhere.

I'd been writing straight lines for years without noticing, direct resolutions, tidy endings. *Curves* was the record where I made myself avoid the straight path on purpose, every time I felt one forming under my hands. Harder than it sounds. The straight line is always the easiest exit from a phrase.

Between the notes I left in as much geometry as I could and none of the shortcuts. It's the least efficient record I've made. I think it's also the most honest.