Perceptions

4 Mar, 2022

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Tracks

Contempt for Others04:10
Human Code05:19
Fires in the Rain05:55
Father Time07:24

Recorded around the time of the release of debut album The Art of Loneliness, Mock Deer’s Perceptions EP marks a more relaxed and confident side to singer/songwriter Ricky Damiani’s approach and output.

During a busy creative period, Damiani accepted an invitation to record with long-time friends and collaborators, Canadian band The Burning Hell. Holing up in Snowbird Studios – the band’s mobile recording unit, hooked onto a wood-panelled villa amid the Italian Mountains above Rome – Damiani opted to explore and flesh out the unfinished songs he was still working on at the time.

These songs, still forming, became the backbone of what was to become an organic recording process, the band learning and jamming the day’s material directly onto tape, spilling into evenings of communal meals and local wine with the people living around them. A departure from the meticulous and long process that went into forming The Art of Loneliness, this raw, lo-fi approach makes for a record that you can almost hear moving into place as you listen. The speed with which the songs were brought together means there was no time to labour over creative decisions as before; the result has an open-ness and gentle magic to it.

Time seems to be at the core of the EP’s lyrical content, too. In typically reflective mode, Damiani addresses the complications of ageing in songs like Father Time and Human Code. His take on the continual re-calibration required for co-existence is smartly wrought too. “Contempt for others, based on their ethical and moral views / Ego’s a motherfucker, Take it down a peg or two, won’t you?”, he declaims across the anthemic chorus of Contempt, a song squarely aimed at the bloody minded, the blame-driven and “cancel culture”.

Damiani returned from Italy with these recordings just as the World ground to a halt in early 2020. Inevitably, the project’s momentum also slowed. Again influenced by circumstance, the second phase of production on the EP became slower and more reflective, Damiani choosing to sit with the recordings and wait out the “strange and dark” 18-month period. He opted not to live-stream Mock Deer performances during lockdowns, leading to a decision to hold back the recordings’ release. Over the period Damiani and producer/collaborator Scott Fitzgerald took time to adjust, edit and add a little to them, creating an end product which synthesises two approaches to working – and two sets of global circumstances – in a very personal way.

These songs were locked down with the rest of us; the time has finally come to let them go.

Credits