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When an artist with a well-established career, successful past recordings, and a large global following releases a self-titled album, it usually points to a creative high point, a stylistic breakthrough, or even a back-to-basics moment. When Peter Gregson chose to self-title his newest album, he had that kind of significance in mind. The award-winning Scottish cellist and composer says Peter Gregson, a collection of nine contemporary songs without words for cello and synthesizer due April 11th on Decca Records US, is “the closest to what I hear in my head that I’ve ever reached.”

To elaborate, Gregson recalls a two-page spread in a book of images by the iconic photographer Richard Avedon. “On the left side, there’s a beautiful, very technical photograph of a glass of water, and the caption reads, ‘This is a photograph of a glass of water,’” Gregson says. “Then on the other page, there is a Polaroid of the same glass of water and it says, ‘This is a glass of water.’”

He felt a similar ambiguity about some of his own past work: Is this the piece of music, or is it a recording of the piece of music? In that sense, Peter Gregson feels like a breakthrough. “This, to me, feels like the piece of music,” he says. “The sound of the cello is the best capturing of my sound, my ideas and intentions, that I've reached.”

Part of that success comes down to the recording location and process. “Historically, I've recorded in big, generous acoustics” Gregson explains. But when it came to conceiving and capturing ideas he viewed as a modern-day equivalent to songs without words – a Romantic-era notion popularized by the 19th-century composer Felix Mendelssohn – Gregson opted for a different approach to his new album, starting with recording it in the Big Room at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios.

“It is just a very big room—but it is basically that dense '70s, '80s rock-vocal sound,” Gregson says. “It doesn’t flatter anything: if you sound good in there, you sound good. I wanted to make it very honest, so it's not rolled in reverb, it's not heavily processed.” Acknowledging his blending of disparate sound sources, Gregson and his team recorded the cello to tape while capturing the synthesizer accompaniment digitally.

Not just any synthesizer, either: Searching for the sound he had in his head, Gregson took matters into his own hands and built his own. “A modular synthesizer typically would have an oscillator, and then go into filters, maybe a sequencer, reverb, delays—things to create a complete sound world,” he explains.

Gregson’s bespoke set-up comprises similar elements, including a series of samplers and sequencers. “But the big thing is that it doesn’t have any oscillators; it only has a mic input for the cello,” he says. “So everything that runs through it is a cello, and everything that comes out of it was created on a cello.” The synthesizer, he notes, actually allows him to use every sound the cello can produce, including coarse scrapes and subsonic rumbles, for expressive purposes.

With those instruments and that technical vocabulary available, Gregson says, writing the album was an organic process. “I would start with a melody, or even just a sound, and then flesh it out from that,” he explains. Using his modular synthesizer, he spent days trying to realize sounds he heard in his head in order to bring his arrangements to life.

“I think there's something about the friction of that,” Gregson says. “I could create a delay or a harmonized line in a few mouse clicks on the computer, but it's not the same process. And sometimes that friction leads you down a different path of discovery.”

In pursuing his process, Gregson recorded everything, “because you never know when something's going to be the one,” he says. Curating ideas required time, he explains, which allowed for reflection and consideration. “You’re trying to be refined and thoughtful with the story that you’re telling, rather than trying to pack everything in.”

What resulted, Gregson says, is a collection of lyrical, atmospheric vignettes that came together with a compelling flow. And whether it resulted through focused creativity, serendipity, or perhaps some of each, the track sequence on Peter Gregson reflects the chronological order in which he composed and documented the pieces.

What’s more, in a very real sense each piece had a bearing on how the next piece took shape. The dreamlike warble of “Sphere,” which Gregson viewed as a natural opening track, set the stage for the percussive “Prism”—appropriately titled, since all of its subtle, varied sounds were produced with cello alone, refracted with electronic effects into a rainbow span of hues. The activity of that piece led to the denser, more introspective “Ritual,” which in turn prompted the ecstatic rhapsody of “Constellation.”

And so on, one idea leading to another, one mood or style sparking an equal and opposite response, until what emerged in the end – in addition to a modern-day collection of songs without words – was a confident self-portrait of a composer and performer at the peak of his imaginative powers.

“It's exciting playing around with album sequencing and trying out different orders, different journeys through a record; you can really shape the experience of a record that way,” Gregson says. “But everything about this felt like it was about being as simple and honest as possible.”

Gregson recalls his Avedon example: “It's not the photograph of a glass of water, with every lighting effect accounted for; it is simply the glass of water,” he says. “This is the music as I wrote it. Here it is.”

Given an offering so honest and straightforward, there could only be one title: Peter Gregson.

written by Steve Smith