Peak Performance: what does a walk up a mountain sound like?
Words Grace McCloud
Photography Elliot Sheppard
Music Tom Bradbury
Production Harry Cave
Taking a post-lockdown hike up Wales’s tallest mountain as his inspiration, a promising young composer has written a piece of extraordinary ambient music that aims to encapsulate the soaring sense of freedom he felt at its summit. We take another listen to the commission, first published in Issue No.6 of The Modern House magazine.
What does a mountain sound like? Or, more specifically, what does a walk up a 1,085-metre mountain in the gossamer mist sound like? This is the not entirely straightforward question Tom Bradbury has had to ask himself.
Tom is a composer and multi-instrumentalist who, when we met him, was in his third year studying at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in Greenwich. At the end of 2022, we approached the south-east London music school with an ambitious idea: could they help us find someone to write a piece of music encapsulating a journey of their choice? It was to form part of Sound UK’s Sonic Journeys series, a collection of landscape-specific compositions devised to allow listeners to experience a walk, a train journey, a bike ride perhaps, while travelling along it themselves. The series centres on commissions including Adrian Utley of Portishead’s musical meandering through ancient trees at Croft Castle, and Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory’s trek in the Malverns. It is also open to contributions from the public – anyone inspired can submit their own Sonic Journey through the website.
Tom’s submission to our brief was breathtaking, his concept bold: he would write a piece of music encapsulating a hike up – and down – the escarpments of Snowdon – Yr Wyddfa – Wales’s tallest peak. In the summer of 2020, Tom had zigged and zagged his way up the mountain with his father and brother, scaling it on the short, tough and rugged Pyg track, before descending along the more languorous Llanberis path. The first Covid lockdown had eased and Tom felt on top of the world. “I experienced a sense of freedom that I find quite hard to put into words,” he says, dreamily. Happily, he has music at his fingertips instead.
The finished piece, which you can listen to below, is not just inspired by Snowdon, it is of Snowdon, sculpted and shaped by its ridges and cliffs. “I thought it would be interesting to incorporate the map coordinates of various points of the trail,” says Tom, describing how he went about writing the piece, a complex ambient soundscape of swelling strings and synth. Each number was given a corresponding note – 1 became C, 2 became D and so on – and a corresponding note length, forming a scale that becomes a fragmented leitmotif throughout the composition. The duration was also decided by those coordinate points; rather than alighting upon an arbitrary length, Tom explains that the piece ended “when the numbers ran out. I had no idea how long it would end up being,” he laughs. It now runs to seven minutes and 48 seconds.
Tom’s suggestion that he was led purely by numbers belies the artistry at the centre of his writing. The composition, titled simply Snowdon, is a reflection of his new experimental explorations of ambient music – particularly the shimmering reverberations, pulsing energy and atmospheric timbres of the kind Brian Eno, a great hero of Tom’s, propelled to the fore in the late 1970s and ’80s. “There’s an album by Eno called Ambient 1: Music for Airports,” Tom responds when asked about his influences, “that somehow accentuates the entire environment around you. That’s what I wanted to create with this piece.” It’s part of a broader ambition he’s pursuing, he explains, telling us about his burgeoning interest in working on more site-specific and multidimensional sonic-art pieces. He’s started working with a woodland planting organisation called Gone West, geo-mapping the coordinates of tree locations into soundscapes. When we speak, Tom has also just finished a university project, for which he and a group of dancers and choreographers collected sound recordings together, before creating a multimedia music and movement piece. “Blurring the boundaries of how we think about music is what excites me,” he says. “I want to find a way of reflecting the environment in what I do.”
Starting on Snowdon, he envisaged trying to represent the feeling of reaching the top, “of being surrounded by nothing but the earth’s expansive atmosphere”, he says. “At the top of the mountain, you’re enveloped by horizon, mist, wind and nothing else. That feeling is vast.” He also cites the Icelandic band Sigur Rós as an influence and, in particular, the way they use a bow rather than a pick to play the electric guitar to create an undulating acoustic phenomenon that Tom has used to ethereal effect in Snowdon. There is a breadth and depth to this sound that conveys a soaring summit sublimely, in the Romantic sense: emotion, nature, overwhelming beauty. Later in the piece, it finds a counterpoint in the cheering clatter of cutlery and babbling chatter as we encounter a passing portrait of the Halfway House, a Snowdon snack stop.
The clamour of the café is one of the field sounds Tom was intent on including in the fabric of the composition, in order to represent the specifics of this particular journey. Throughout its duration, the scrunch of gravel beneath walking boots becomes an arrhythmic pacemaker of sorts, marking the passage of time and distance. At various points, wind whistles and swirls – a series of small, gusty crescendos against more traditional instrumentals. There is birdsong, too, and the dissonant scream of the train that runs alongside the Llanberis path, both recorded and ingeniously recreated with synths.
These sounds surge and recede as we move along the sonic journey – representative of Tom’s interest in the way we listen to the piece. “I wanted to play around with the idea of space as well as sound,” he says, “so I tried hard to think about where things were going as well as when, making use of the left and right speakers in headphones.” That way, he was able to manipulate the density of sound that surrounds the listener at any given point.
The culmination of all these immersive effects is that to listen is to feel diminutive within the expanse of sound – part of a bigger landscape. It’s not a negative sensation – far from it – rather an uplifting one. You are swept along by the sounds of walking and weather as the strings wash over you like so many waves. There is a subtle interplay of simplicity and complexity in this piece, as there is in so much ambient music, Tom explains. “It can be background music if you want it to be, but if you let yourself sink into it, you start to hear all the different layers at work.” Like a view, the longer you spend with it, the more it reveals itself.
There is much to explore in Snowdon’s near eight minutes. One of its most profound moments can be found in the dying seconds of the piece, when all footsteps have finished, instruments have faded and we are left with just the wind. It surges around our ears: an elemental force with no beginning and no end to its ceaseless swirling journey. But while it feels a fitting way to finish, this emptiness is not the ultimate endowment of the piece. Rather it is the journey to hope one experiences, as the sound begins to summit, that is Snowdon’s essence. That feeling of freedom, of openness – all the things Tom felt with his family on that mist-swathed day in August 2020, unbound from a long hard lockdown. He is right: it is hard to put into words. Instead, we just have to listen.
