Elliot Galvin: beauty among the ruins

Back in 2019 pianist Elliot Galvin and his trio – with Tom McCredie’s bass and Corrie Dick drumming –took themselves off to the Artone Studio in Haarlem, Netherlands, to make a defiantly anti-modern statement. The album they made – ironically named Modern Times – was recorded by cutting direct to the master disc, a vintage technique made obsolete by the invention of magnetic tape. It was said to be "a quiet protest against the overproduced, changing world we live in" and Galvin followed it up with 2020’s Live In Paris, a simple, solo recording of an improvised performance from 2018.

So far, so back to basics, but any sense of a retro trajectory evaporates with the 2025 arrival of The Ruin, a complex electro-acoustic collage album created through intense studio production with Galvin’s distinctive piano merely one element among many. He’s unrepentant about this volte face, however, saying: “I quite like that thing of having a completely dogmatic approach to something and then doing the complete opposite - and being dogmatic about that, too!”

Nevertheless he also feels that there are continuities to be found: “Yes, this is the most produced record I’ve yet made but there is a connection: Modern Times was recorded direct to vinyl and each side was just one take, so I had to decide the track order and have a really clear idea of that beforehand. That made it a part of the compositional process that I hadn’t done before with a record, but The Ruin is really like that: the track order is the most important thing, more than any detail of the notes.”

Circumstances played a big part in this new direction as well. Galvin’s major solo tour supporting Live In Paris only managed a couple of 2020 gigs before the pandemic kicked in. His trio had also been negotiating another potential album but, once the Covid dust had settled, that idea had also fizzled. More importantly, Galvin had become a father for the first time, a life-changing event that had a profound influence on The Ruin’s development: “I started writing this just after Henry, my son, was born and it was a big thing to navigate: ‘OK, my life is different now’. And suddenly you stop only thinking short term and start thinking about twenty years’ time, thirty years’ time.

"Are there privileges I enjoy now that he won’t? What’s the world he’ll inherit and what am I doing to try and shape that world so it’s not some bleakly desolate nuclear fall-out landscape?” (As if to prove that point - shortly after our interview Galvin moved a tour date from Kings Place to The Vortex after discovering that the former was hosting a booking from global arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin.)

The Ruin might therefore be heard as a rather bleak, albeit alluring, tone poem: one track actually uses the transcription of a Chernobyl Geiger counter for the rhythm, another (‘As If By Weapons’) opens with a barrage of electronics simulating explosions and automatic weapon fire. Ruth Goller contributes voice as well as bass – Galvin is a great admirer of her Skylla vocal project – imbuing several tracks with a haunted fragile beauty, while Seb Rochford’s drumming is as flawlessly eclectic as you would expect.

Less predictably, the strings of the Ligeti Quartet are deployed in often unexpected ways, as is the shakuhachi flute of Shabaka Hutchings. That top-drawer cast list reflects Galvin’s impressive musical standing in the UK music world, earned through a tireless decade of collaborations since leaving Trinity Laban in 2014. Alongside his eponymous trio these notably include a duo pairing with drummer Binker Golding, a number of orchestral and other commissions and, of course, his membership of Mercury-nominated quartet Dinosaur.

For Galvin each new musical encounter is an important learning experience that feeds into his musical technique. At the end of 2024 he returned from China after an extensive tour with Hutchings now showcasing the latter’s use of the wooden flute. That imposed some new limitations: “There’s just six notes the flute can play and, as an accompanist, anything you do other than those six notes is going to sound really wrong.

"So it’s like … what can I do that’s slightly different but still … you know? Shabaka’s very gentle, not dogmatic, but he’s got a very particular approach that he wants from the sound. I learnt a lot about what the boundaries were, what’s appropriate and what’s not.”

Their ongoing musical understanding had already paid off while making The Ruin, however, because while Galvin was able to develop the music with Goller and Rochford over time, Hutchings could only give one day to the process.

Galvin still marvels at how it panned out: “That was mad because we kept trying to find a date where we were all free and it wasn’t working so me, Ruth and Seb recorded the backings and then Shabaka came in. He hadn’t had a chance to listen to it beforehand but he played it in just one take, straight through. And there were so many beautiful synchronous moments where he and Seb just hooked up, playing the same rhythm - it was uncanny.“

The concept of The Ruin began when Galvin was exploring folk music and found the fragmentary translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem: “It’s someone’s imagined idea of this glorious past in the context of the ruins that are left. No-one knows who the writer was and it’s hard to find any definitive text for it. Some of it was burnt away and that’s also what’s so great – even the poem itself is ruined!”

While the verse provides enigmatic titles for the album’s tracks, for Galvin the notion of crumbling grandeur chimed with his formative experiences growing up in the Medway Towns in Kent. Since the demise of its identity as a naval dockyard, he sees a community that lost its identity and culture: “People feel ‘We had that industry and it’s gone, we have nothing left culturally to cling on to. And we were once a great empire!’ It becomes this warped, distorted idea that’s a ruin in itself. If you grow up in a town like Medway and you have any kind of creative spark you’re going to find an escape.”

For Galvin that escape came by train: “There’s the line up to London and part of The Ruin is that railway journey… the bleakness of the landscape, the stretch between Gravesend and Greenhithe, the Medway Marshes - it’s beautiful even though it’s so bleak, flat and desolate.”

Journey’s end was Trinity Laban in Greenwich where Galvin went first to the Juniors and then the graduate programme. There, as well as being tutored by Liam Noble among others, he also met his wife-to-be, trumpeter/composer Laura Jurd. Emerging from college he launched a trio project about Dreamland, the Margate fairground that had then fallen into disrepute: “When I was a kid it was quite dodge, just crumbling away, and it burned down in mysterious circumstances.”

His imaginatively disjointed music became part of a themed installation at the Turner Tate Gallery, and then his 2013 debut album. Looking back, he sees a connection: “There’s something about that, my fascination with bleak landscapes, decay. Maybe it’s a full circle from that album to this.”

But for all this emphasis on bleakness, anyone watching Galvin perform will notice a strong element of playfulness that he feels is equally part of The Ruin, not least in the creative process: “This record may sound dark (but) the process of it was the most playful. I wanted every stage to be creative and playful - the mixing process to be as creative as the writing process and the playing in the studio process. I feel like you need to have the doors wide open when you’re making anything so something unexpected can fall into your lap and you think that’s what I’m going to use.

"For me being playful is all about being receptive - what fits is what sticks. So for me it’s all about play. But serious play!”

The Ruin is out on Gearbox Records on 28 February

from www.jazzwise.com