Music / electronica
Towering Inspiration
For a creative artist it can be hard to predict where inspiration will come from. For musician Dan Moore it was a single photograph of a lonely tower strangely stranded in the middle of a lake that stirred something in him.
“I got completely obsessed with it, it became an idea that just wouldn’t go away,” he recalls. “The tower seemed to have been designed to blend into the landscape but, just by the nature of being itself, it does the opposite. It stands out as being odd.”
Now, more than a decade after that first encounter, Dan is releasing Kielder Water Music, an EP of electro-acoustic ‘sonic meditations’ inspired by this unlikely obsession.
Composer Dan Moore – photo: Aubrey Simpson
It was during the pandemic that he began creating this music, live-streaming piano improvisations while looking at two images of the tower.
“Everyone was doing gigs online and stuff. I just did them for friends, as a thing,” Dan explains. “But recording one of those and sending it to the Arts Council secured the funding for the music project.”
Dan received a Develop Your Creative Practice award which enabled him to consult with film composer Dan Jones about working on a large scale piece using found sound, analogue synth and digital keyboards.
The piece would also involve a string quartet – an area of composition that Dan Moore had never attempted before.
Surprisingly, despite some 25 years as a highly regarded professional musician (Phantom Limb, Modulus III, Will Gregory’s Moog Ensemble, Electric Lady Big Band and countless session work) this would be the first time he would make something in his own name: “I’ve always had a bit of an identity crisis, really.
“I’ve tried out so many things with awesome people across different musical fields but never actually figured out where I stand if left to my own devices. What’s my flag in the sand?
“It did involve quite a lot of soul searching to think about who the hell I am when it comes to my own musical expression. But I think with Kielder it’s close, I’m kind of there.”
That emotive tower rises from Kielder Water, a reservoir in Northumberland created in the early 80s by the Kielder Dam project.
It is the largest artificial lake in Northern Europe, planned to provide water and hydroelectric power for a big industrial expansion that never came. Now its primary value is as a leisure resource, the Kielder Water & Forest Park.
Dan knew nothing of this when he first saw that picture. It took a trip to the British Library to trace the location and discover a musical link in light orchestral composer Ernest Tomlinson – “He was the only other musician I am aware of who’s written something about the tower. He wrote a commissioned piece in 1982 to celebrate the launch of the thing.
“The government of the time wanted to send it out with a bang to say this is going to change everybody’s lives – which it never really did.”
He finally managed to visit his muse in 2018 by taking a 300 mile detour after playing at the 2018 Leeds Jazz Festival: “I just phoned home and said I’m going to do a bit of a loop, I’ll be a little later than planned! Then I went up, took some photos and actually met Jonty – a man who, when he was a little boy, pressed the button that flooded the dam.
“That became my entry point into the whole thing. I tried to connect all these stories with the unintended consequences of it looking the way it does. Interspersed with the music is Jonty’s voice reimagined as a drum machine and there’s Mike (Roberts), an actual tower engineer, also on the last track.
“There’s lots of sounds from inside the tower and around it – I took a drone and there’s stuff on my Youtube channel of it flying through the tunnel underneath the water.”
Kielder Water tower – photo: Dan Moore
The four immersive tracks of Kielder Water Music range from the bubbling electronica of The Architect to the ponderous doom-chords of VT-15, the sudden orchestral synth sweeps of A Shift in the Land and, finally, the simple minimalist accretions of string quartet harmonies in Mike.
The complex layering of sound throughout reflects many late night hours of patient studio work experimenting with his self assembled sonic library of field recordings, musical improvisations and synth explorations.
The latter were mostly created on a newly acquired Moog modular synth while Dan was laid up with a broken hip: “I rigged up a kind of recovery table that had it on and I would doodle away through my morphine addled state.”
Eventually he whittled down some 30 pieces to develop the final four: “They’re the best representations of how that moment in time needed to be.”
Kielder Water tower under moonlight – photo: Dan Moore
He released them and Bandcamp immediately picked the EP for their New and Notable showcase for March 2026, a fine affirmation of Dan’s musical quality and creative vision and a vindication of his decision to put them out.
His friend, producer Ethan Johns, had been an important encouragement: “He said that if you’re making music you have to put it out there for people or you’re not completing the circuit of it.
“You’ve got to put it in front of people to listen to and then it’ll change again. So I’m glad I didn’t just hang on to them in some sort of weird hermit-y way. And I’m now definitely more interested in putting things out.”
Does that mean more is on the way? “I am still humming things into dictaphones and sketching out ideas. I’m being very aware, still got my ears wide open, because in my experience these things can happen at any moment.
“I’m pretty exhausted right now but it feels good: there’s no point in doing it if I haven’t got that kind of drive, the will to do it. There will be more music, but I’ve no idea what the next thing might be, there’s a lot of things flying around at the moment. We’ll see …”
Dan Moore’s EP Kielder Water Music is available through Bandcamp.
Main image: Dan Moore
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