April (Stevens & Pound): Album Liner Notes Exclusive

This month sees us launch our debut album Ascending on Idiom Records. To celebrate, this blog reveals an exclusive first peak at the record's liner notes.

The title Ascending references The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Willams, the first piece we ever learned together. It emerged from an initial jam session that erupted into musical fireworks and made it immediately clear that we needed to create more music. As musicians, we both embrace the spirit of “larking”: playfulness, curiosity, and invention. Much classical and folk music looks back through acts of descent and preservation. Our debut album Ascending seeks instead to rise from tradition, using it as a springboard for something new. 

At the heart of the album is a meeting of our respective thousand-year old musical worlds. Delia is a classically trained percussionist, fluent in notation. Will is a harmonica and melodeon player shaped by the folk tradition, learning entirely by ear. From the outset, neither of us wished to create a project that placed classical and folk music side by side. Instead, we set out to forge a genuinely new shared language - a Stevens & Pound genre - built on mutual curiosity and trust.

Ascending draws inspiration from the English Folk Revival of the early 20th century, when classical composers collected, transcribed, and reimagined national folk music. Once a tune is written down, it becomes frozen in time; yet folk music has always been a continuously evolving, living tradition, shaped by region, community, and individual voice. For Ascending we have chosen to revive core classical giants of the repertoire inspired by folk music: Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, Holst’s Planets Suite and St Paul’s Suite. The music becomes a shapeshifting constellation of sounds - reassembled, and continually rediscovered depending on whose hands the music falls into.

Our compositional process reflects this philosophy. Each piece begins with Delia analysing an existing score, identifying its core musical identity - whether rhythmic, melodic, harmonic, or textural. These elements are then recorded and shared with Will, who learns them entirely by ear. Once we have committed the material to memory, the score is set aside and the real exploration begins.

In this way, Ascending becomes a kind of phoenix: rising from the ashes of both of our musical traditions. Will reawakens the folk idioms that have filtered into classical music over time. Together, we see music as fluid and responsive - played through the lens of the present moment, whilst deeply respectful of its roots beyond even the score itself.

For Delia as a percussionist, she had no idea which instruments she would pick up at the beginning of this process, which became a source of creative freedom. The modern drum kit - often referred to as “traps,” from the word contraption - serves as a guiding metaphor: not a single instrument, but a carefully curated collection of sounds that function as one. The metallic world of the vibraphone is extended with toy piano, musical boxes and handpan. Kalimba mimics Holst’s pizzicato writing in Ostinato. Spinning bells from a child’s toy collection reflect the kaleidoscopic string writing of Jupiter. Each carefully selected sound developed an inventor’s mindset and an ongoing hunt for colour.

Will’s diatonic instruments - melodeon (diatonic accordion) and harmonicas - are are rooted in specific keys. This demands constant logistical problem-solving to realise the complex harmonic language and angular melodic writing in classical music. Where a full folk concert might require four harmonicas that entire evening, Holst’s Jupiter alone calls for six in the space of five minutes. He found that these limitations reshaped rather than restricted the music, forcing him to circumnavigate these traditional instruments in brand new ways.

Like us, all of the music on this album is English in origin, yet it continually reaches outward. Norwegian Wood reflects the Beatles’ early encounters with Indian classical music; The Planets opens onto the vast sonic imagination of unexplored space travel; St Paul’s Suite moves from its familiar jigs into hopping bluegrass and serene, minimalist soundscapes; and the Sailor’s Hornpipe hurtles from traditional dance into the energy of a rave. 

Our most radical reimagination comes with the addition of Earth to Holst’s Planet Suite, a movement Holst famously omitted, describing it as “astrologically insignificant.” For this work, we were honoured to collaborate with writer Robert Macfarlane, whose text helps frame an artistic meditation on the future of our own silenced planet. 

The album was recorded in a range of places; we were lucky enough to use the same desk that the Beatles recorded on in Abbey Road at Guy Chamber’s Sleeper Studios for Norwegian Wood, and to visit the iconic Wood Room at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios. We cannot thank the “above and beyond” of the engineers involved enough and Idiom Records for championing the album; special thanks in particular to andie thomson (Gighouse Recording Studios) and Alexander Van Ingen.

This debut album transforms our collective pasts into a reimagined future. Ascending is not about preserving tradition behind glass, but about letting it breathe, change, and rise - alive in the present, and always reaching upward, building upon what has become before and since.

Delia and Will