Bassist Marcus Vergette finds time for gigging and recording alongside his career as a sculptor, working the North Devon farm where he lives and, now, launching a record label, Nightjar Records, to highlight new music from the South West. Jon Turney talked to him.
Here’s a sound you’ve not heard woven into a jazz ensemble before. The longest track on Marcus Vergette’s new recording uses rhythms captured from an ant colony on his farm. The ants tolerate a rare parasitic hoverfly because it mimics their chemical signals and, it’s now thought, because fly pupae can generate noise the ants also sense. When an Imperial College researcher visited to capture these stridulations, Vergette kept the audio files. Years later, they form part of the backdrop for a striking nine-minute piece, Hoverfly and the Ants, for three vocalists, violin, drums and bass.
It’s a fine example of making art using whatever comes to hand and, as Vergette explains the science as enthusiastically as he describes the music, you can see how he has maintained such broad interests. In sculpture, he’s currently best known for bells that are activated by the tide which are appreciated by folks at quite a few places along our coast. That strand of work was originally prompted by the bells of his local church in Highampton (the subject of a recent visit by Radio 4).
The Highampton bells appear on the new recording, too, following an earlier release on the NonClassical label, Tintinnabulation, which featured sounds from the Time and Tide sculptures. But the main inspiration this time is the farm where Vergette has lived and worked for nearly forty years. Different tracks incorporate other field recordings – a literal term for once – some going back as far as 2005. There are sounds of birdsong and tractors, crickets (more stridulation) but also a country auction and the grandfather clock in Vergette’s home. Lyrics delivered by the harmonising vocalists are accompanied variously by bass, drums, sax and piano. The whole thing, Vergette hopes, draws a portrait of the farm. “The first song, 31 birds, is the dawn chorus, and the bells that Steve Buckley’s whistle accompanies at the end are the evening chorus, so the whole thing is a bit like a day in my mind.”
The lyrics are by Vergette, aided by Ted Hughes, and, for the hoverflies, Kate Westbrook, who was gripped by their story as by a fairytale (Vergette has played bass in various Mike Westbrook ensembles since the great man’s move back to the west country).
It all makes for a set that doesn’t sound quite like anything else, music that is open to all influences, but rooted in the details of a special, human-managed ecosystem. He began with the found sounds, then brought in words, then music, aiming, he says for song melodies, with breathing space for both singer and listener. The results fit into compositions where singing is interspersed with instrumental interludes as well as field sounds.
That reflects both Vergette’s creative inclinations and the way he relates to his patch of land. He originally bought the farm in a move from London on search of affordable studio space for his sculpture. But the small holding, cheap at the time because rough and strewn with wildflowers, turned out full of interest. “Since we weren’t farming, it gave us a chance to really get to know what we had. And then we discovered, you know, we’ve got some of the rarest things around.”
Actual farming drew him in deeper, he says. “Through the process of work on the land, you get more interested in the detail of things. It’s not landscape, it’s not big shape, it’s little, tiny details – what happens in each corner of each field. And with that engagement, we discovered all these amazing things.”
An eye for detail will serve him well with the new venture that goes along with the recording, a new label, Nightjar Records. This stems from an ambition to see if new music in Devon and Cornwall can achieve critical mass: “There are a lot of people doing it down here, but kind of strung out along a peninsula, which creates problems in terms of building a gig structure and an audience.”
The appearance of The Farm, Vergette’s portrait of rural life, marks a soft launch for the label. The plan is to have half a dozen releases for a full launch in the Spring. They’ll include new work from “transtonal electronica” duo Goldbeard, and an intriguing collaboration involving composer Emma Kate Matthews, experimental Bristol-based outfit Coppersound (who work with, among other things, bells they design themselves) and Vergette again, using church bells. “That’s already in the can.” he says with satisfaction.
The presentation promises to be unusual, too. There will be LPs, but no CDs – because eco-vinyl apparently exists but the carbon footprint of CDs is insupportable. Besides, LPs are nicer: “I like the physical object, the vinyl, you know, I’m a sculptor.” More important, perhaps, the LP affords space for a Vergette engraving on the cover, which can be sold separately. That will furnish artwork that gives the label a distinctive identity, and also bring something new to Bandcamp. “You get that merch tab, it’s only, like, T-shirts and hoodies. We’ve got a very different type of merch!”
The unframed prints of the etching that adorns The Farm are on offer for £100, which should help keep this new not-for-profit venture afloat. In any case, he reports happily, the LP has already nearly broken even just from selling the vinyl. That encourages the belief that the whole project will be viable in traditional small-label fashion: each batch of releases will bring in revenue that finances the next round of recordings, and the merch should allow for some paid help with the admin.
You get the impression that Vergette would take care of the admin himself, except for all the other things he does. Along with the sculpture, he is animating a campaign to restore the bells in Highampton Church for a community who first heard them in the 14th century, as that Radio 4 programme relates. And he remains a bass player on call, happy to hold things down from the back of the stage.
That is socially as well as musically rewarding, as work in the sculpture studio and on the farm is largely solitary. And sometimes it’s even better, when engagements with Westbrook are “an opportunity to play with a hero”. We speak a few days after a sellout gig in Lyme Regis for Westbrook’s current Band of Bands. Pianist Matthew Bourne was on hand, but Vergette emphasises that Westbrook, now 89, was also “really playing, you know! Some magical moments: when you’re playing with Mike, you cherish every minute”. A few days before that, I saw him grooving mightily in a quartet with pianist Kieron Garrett, recently moved down from London and now stirring things up musically in Sidmouth. Come to think of it, I can’t recall interviewing anyone who seems so fulfilled in so many different ways. A record label that harnesses just some of that creative energy should be one to watch.
