Group Listening

Musical collaborators for the past decade, Paul Jones and Stephen Black are together known as the woodwind-and-key-wielding, sculptural-papier-mâché-hat-wearing GROUP LISTENING.

New album Walks - their first album of completely original compositions - is set to be released 10th May on PRAH Recordings and today they share brand new single “Shopping Building” [music video / streaming services].

The piece was partly inspired by the green spaces of Milton Keynes and the airy arcades of its modernist shopping centre (voted the UK’s best looking shopping centre in 1993; and the setting for Cliff Richard’s “Wired For Sound” music video in 1981).

Designed in the 1970s, it was originally actually called Shopping Building and intended as a ‘permeable’ space with doors left open at night, and with squares where people could gather to chat, eat and enjoy public social gatherings and exhibitions. But it later became a symbol of consumerism when it fell into private hands in the 1980s.

“This tune started life as a saxophone experiment on a cold January evening in my home studio in Penarth. I’d been inspired by Sam Gendel and his sax playing and wanted  to see if I could do something similar. Paul heard something in the chaos of the saxes and placed them in a world I never imagined. He made them danceable and funky.” - Stephen Black

"Nic's video perfectly encapsulates the utopianism and civic optimism of the original planners vision for the 'Shopping Building' complex in Milton Keynes.

The vivid colours and paradisal palm trees intercut with still images of the building itself chime perfectly with the haziness of the music. They capture a sense of joy and wonder, conjuring the ideals and dreams of the original planners. This utopianism has been heavily eroded by increasing commercialisation and capitalist uniformity since the day it was built over 40 years ago.

“However, if you tune in you can still feel the positivity of the designer’s original ideas echoing through the building when walking through its potted palms and metallic-gold walkways.” - Paul Jones

"Shopping Building" follows "Hills End", “New Brighton” and “Frogs”, the latter of which was praised by The Guardian for its “muted woodwind, electric harpsichord and a soothing chorus of frogs into a wistful mood fit for a vexed romance.”

About Group Listening and Walks:

Following renegade reinterpretation records Clarinet & Piano: Selected Works Vol. 1 (2018) and Vol. 2 (2022), which pulled apart, pondered, and re-shaped cult ambient classics by the likes of Robert Wyatt, Arthur Russell and Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Walks (2024) is a shining modernist monolith buried deep in the woods.

Walks draws from the field recordings of Ernest Hood; the abstraction of Harold Budd; the saxophone of Sam Gendel; the “heightened naturalism” of a Martin Parr photograph; the clarity and site-specificity of Japanese ambient, environmental & new age music of the 80s and 90s, and, prominently, Robert Walser’s pseudo-biographical novella The Walk — an appreciation of the philosophical space gifted by walks to walkers.

“Some of the places are real, while others are invented. Many of them are from actual walks that Steve and I took - mostly when on the road while touring, between shows, exploring,” says Paul Jones.

“When we first starting touring with Group Listening, both Steve and I became fascinated with going on long walks between shows, so if we had a day off we would find somewhere en route to the next show and go on a long, often aimless adventure. Sometimes we’d also take a long city walk; from Hackney to Soho in London, or an exploration of Milton Keynes, taking in its green spaces as well as its utopian modernism.”

Jones continues: “These pieces were not imagined as companion pieces to listen to while visiting a particular location (although they certainly can be used in that way), but more as a layering of notions and thoughts for places visited - redrawn as music, conjurations of feelings evoked by place. Much of the music is a celebration of random movement, of dérivistic exploration. Wandering into the drift.”

An ode to the gently psychedelic potential of wandering around in some place, any place, every place: the places in one’s own mind, Walks invites you to listen and think; to slip through the fabric of time a little or a lot, depending on how long you’ve got. Over all, to paraphrase Walser, it invites you to glow and flower yourself in the glowing, flowering present.