This instrument is the perfect example of two instruments, lacking that special something by themselves, coming together to form a beautiful whole.

I had asked my friend Catriona, a seasoned clarinet teacher at St. Helen and St. Katharine in Oxfordshire, to provide some breathy samples for me. I always tended to shy away from this instrument in composition. I’m not sure why, it just never moved me the way, say, an oboe did, but it does have this lovely, fragile, autumnal and woody tone.

The other instrument was created by me (very not a string player) playing (very badly) a very scratchy note on a viola (later discovered to be G#6). I fed this into PaulStretch and added some tape saturation and splosh. Again, a cool instrument, but incomplete by itself.

On blending the two together, the viola pad, mixed a little lower, made a perfect reverb bed for the clarinet instrument. So here it is as a multi – pre-blended, but feel free to dial in the amounts yourself.

A perfect instrument to mark drawn-in evenings and clocks going back.