The Untangled Knot Is Here

Well we weren’t going to start our project on April Fools’ Day! The Untangled Knot is now officially a thing. It’s as much a community project as it is a music project, in which we aim to bring people together to demonstrate what’s possible. Our pilot performance here in Berwick on 21st November will be preceded by a four-hour afternoon song creation workshop, in some way to mirror what we’re doing as a group over the next few months.

We began our work together on 2nd April. Although we’ve been scheming for a while, the deal has always been that nothing would start until the official start date: no tune creation, no lyrics, no preconceived ideas, no nothing. It means we all start from the same point, and each have the same amount of time to write our three songs for the project. The Untangled Knot is a clean page for all of us. This is where the journey begins.

In similar fashion, participants in our November workshop will be tasked with creating a song in an afternoon. It’s less easy to enforce the ‘no preconceived ideas’ rule, but we have some good ideas on how the workshop will work. The idea is that anyone or any group of people who feel confident enough will be invited to perform their afternoon creation in support of our debut gig. More details about that will follow soon.

Each of us has different experience of making things happen in our own music. In my case, I know the spontaneous approach works because that’s how Ali Karim and I created our “Breathe” album. It began as a happy accident. Rather than reviewing past video footage, we opted just to create something. I happened to have a few sets of lyrics in my bag at the time. Four hours later we had the title track, and that’s what you hear HERE. Thereafter, we constructed each song in a day from a randomly selected set of lyrics. At the end of the process, we threw all that video together in Breathe, The Film and edited it in four frenetic hours.

I’m not someone who likes working to rule books, and that’s carried into my music. Jamming can be a great way to find a way forward. It’s a little different for The Untangled Knot because we won’t be writing our album songs in the same room. Following our three-month writing period, we’ll be adding to each other’s work, then exchanging vocal and instrumental files. We then have three periods of rehearsal here in Berwick, one in October, two in November. The last of these will be in the few days before our debut performance as a group. The album will come from initial recordings, rehearsals and our pilot performance, which will also be streamed live to the world. Ambitious? That’s not something we worry about!

Although Rachel and I began talking over two years ago, we’ve never worked together as a group before. We have never met as a group. Beth contributed to Shirley’s debut “Begin, Began, Begun” EP in 2024, but that’s the only prior creative connection in our locker. All we’ve done so far is to establish a basic theme and agree a ‘progressive folk’ style, purely so the final album will feel like an album and not a collection of songs from four different artists. I say ‘all we’ve done’, but actually we’ve created a fabulous spirit between us, and that will be the springboard for the songs that emerge. So here’s our Project Start Day Video to give you an idea of who we are…

Please follow The Untangled Knot on whatever social media you use. We are in the throes of creating a website, and our links are also available HERE. We will be creating a crowdfunding campaign to cover the costs of creating CDs and other merchandise, production, and other marketing costs, and will signpost that nearer the time.

This is a hugely exciting project to be involved with. It’s a project of equals in a world that doesn’t feel especially equal, a project of freedom in a world of restriction, and a project of possibilities in a world where things feel impossible right now. So join us for this inspiring ride!

Peace.

John