United Kingdom

Vega Trails

Artist information

In the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains north-west of Madrid, Milo Fitzpatrick’s creativity has been blossoming apace. Milo first came to prominence as the founding double-bassist in Portico Quartet, but he latterly started his own project Vega Trails to explore his talents as a composer and arranger, as well as an instrumentalist.
Having cut 2022’s beautifully resonant ‘Tremors in the Static’ as a duo, alongside Mammal Hands saxophonist Jordan Smart, while he still lived in North London, he now substantially expands upon that blueprint with his follow-up, ‘Sierra Tracks’, which, as the title suggests, was conceived at his new home in central Spain.
“The landscape here has definitely had an impact on my musical writing,” Milo explains. “I’d describe the terrain as ‘rolling to peak-y’, and you get some really cool colours. When it’s a blue-sky day, dusk is so cool – the whole light goes purple-pink. It’s a great time to go out for a walk and get inspired. When I write these pieces, often I’m going somewhere – sometimes physically, others it’s dream places.”
From the epic five-minute opener, ‘Largo’, onwards, there’s a cinematic feel to ‘Sierra Tracks’, as each piece unfolds according to its own sweeping narrative, often wonderfully evocative of the mountains’ wide-open spaces, and also sometimes elaborately arranged with cello, orchestral strings, vibraphone and piano, to evoke their awe-inspiring natural splendour.
For Milo himself, it was a triumph to pull off such an ambitious record, both while settling in a new country, and also while the world was emerging from pandemic disruption. For him, it’s the culmination of a career which began in the mid-’00s with Portico Quartet, and with the affirmation of a 2008 Mercury Prize nomination for the band’s fledgling ‘Knee-Deep In The North Sea’ album.
Back then, Milo himself had barely graduated from his Popular Music studies at Goldsmiths College, and in his mid-twenties he got to taste burgeoning success, playing to big crowds and recording two further albums for Peter Gabriel’s Real World label.
“Portico is a big part of who I am, and where I’ve got to today,” he says. “We did those three albums, but then we did this electropop record, which didn’t go so well. I had just had a kid, so money was becoming quite important to me. I kind of left the band and took up a bunch of session gigs, but when Jack Wyllie and Duncan Bellamy started writing differently, they asked if I wanted to be involved just playing live, and I was actually really up for going out on the road, hanging out with friends, and playing music together.”
While Milo enjoyed this less pressurized role, a nagging creative urge started to eat away at him. He’d been rethinking his relationship with the double bass, and had bought a new model with a slightly smaller body and slimmer shoulders, which proved revelatory for him. “I’m not a giant guy,” he laughs, “so having an instrument that I could move around more, suddenly it felt like I’d learned 1000 new words. I got excited, like, ‘Wow, I want to say something with this…’”
That was the catalyst for ‘Tremors in the Static’. “We were in this tiny flat in Stamford Hill, really cramped during all the COVID madness, but I’d just stare into the corner of the room, playing these bass lines and humming melodies over the top.” Unable to gather a large group under lockdowns, Milo decided he just needed one other instrumentalist to execute the melodies, inspired by duet records like Charlie Haden’s ‘Closeness’, and Ali Farka Touré & Toumani Diabaté’s ‘In The Heart Of The Moon’.
To that end, he tracked down Jordan Smart, whom he’d got to know around some Gondwana showcase gigs in Japan, where Portico were appearing alongside label mates, Mammal Hands.
“Jordan has a really direct and exciting way that he connects with his instrument, and the audience,” Milo reflects. “He’s into jazz, but also folk of many traditions, and he can play different wind instruments – soprano and tenor sax, bass clarinet, the dadouk, the may flute from Turkey and Armenia – which gave the possibility of a wider palette of voices for the melodies. Jordan’s quite Zen, very open, and he’s half Cypriot, so he has a connection with Greek music, too. Knowing his phrasing, I wrote very much with him in mind.”
The pair recorded ‘Tremors…’ in a church in Clapton, East London, “just these two instruments talking to each other,” its extraordinarily pure sound defined by the building’s “insane reverb”. The success of that record, says Milo, “gave me confidence that the bare bones of the music worked.”
The next step, obviously, was to put flesh on the bones, with the kind of instrumentation which hadn’t been achievable under COVID, but this became equally challenging logistically once Milo relocated to Spain with his family. “I didn’t have the usual musicians on my doorstep to try stuff out, like I did in London, so I had to compose a lot in my head, and then figure out how to realise it.”
The answer ultimately was “a patchwork process”, collated virtually. Some elements were easy, such as calling in Taz Modi, Portico’s sometime touring pianist, for when the music required “some rhythmic movement behind us, to free up the bass and sax from being so busy”, and enlisting vibraphone specialist Harriet Riley. Milo decided against having much in the way of drums, because, he says, “the double bass is like a big drum, and you can get so many cool little tones out of it”.
He also himself re-engaged with the cello, an instrument he hadn’t played since school days – necessity, in that instance, very much the mother of invention – while for a few tracks Jordan switched to bass clarinet, its register often naturally entwining with Milo’s double-bass, like two voices in harmony.
The game-changer for the whole project, however, was a conversation with another label mate, Polish pianist-composer Hania Rania, about recording orchestral arrangements.
“I’d been thinking about using strings for a long time, but not just a string quartet – lots of strings! It turned out that Hania does film and TV recording as well as her own music. She’s so positive about making stuff happen: I was like, ‘Can you get ten or twelve players?’, and she was like, ‘No problem! You can share a session with me, and I’ll sort out the arrangements’. Suddenly, I realised that the palette could go quite big.”
Now way out of his comfort zone, the night before the session in Poland, Milo barely slept, suffering “a classic anxiety dream, where all the bars on the sheet music had got shredded up and were just a mess on the floor, and I was trying to rearrange them back into order.” He needn’t have worried: these were top-class players who spoke English and totally ‘got’ what he was doing. Between occasional prompts from Ms. Rani, and Mr. Fitzpatrick’s impulsive conducting, the strings for five tracks were captured in one memorable afternoon.
As well as ‘Largo’, Milo is particularly proud of ‘Reverie’, which “has this refrain that fades in and out, like a daydream”, similar, he reckons, to Miles Davis’ treatment of Gershwin’s ‘Fisherman, Strawberry and Devil Crab’ on ‘Porgy and Bess’. Other tracks like ‘Els’ are more firmly rooted in folk melody, but ‘Dream House’ and ‘Sleepwalk Tokyo’ (its title referring to Milo’s ‘Lost In Translation’-style jetlag experiences in the Far East) boost a sense of otherworldliness.
‘Clarifantasia’ gets its curious name from the track’s circling ostinato riff, which he’d hoped Jordan could play on bass clarinet, but proved beyond human breathing – they settled for another instrumental texture, synthesizer, instead.
A shaping influence on Milo’s vision for the record as he digitally collated all the sound files was David Toop’s book, ‘Oceans of Sound’, and viewed each track as an aural story. “I wanted to make sounds that felt equal to where I’ve been roaming in the mountains and forests out here, that reflect the incredible scale of the place. You get these huge views and skylines, which it’s hard to find words for.”
The curious sounds that open the album, at the beginning of ‘Largo’, are an approximation, by Milo on cello, of a harmonic series that is often heard in the Sierra region: when the local knife-sharpeners travel around the neighbouring villages, plying their trade, they play a similar riff on pan pipes to proclaim their arrival. “You get all these announcements, from people collecting scrap iron and steel, or delivering fruit and bread, and I thought that kind of thing would make a good opening for the record.”
With that colourful reference as an overture, ‘Sierra Tracks’ shapes up as a love letter to the rocky landscape within which its creator now resides. It is also, he says, about his mental-health journey out of the pandemic years, which have been so testing for us all.
“I had been thinking about Time, and how history repeats itself, but also how one can become trapped in thoughts, especially on difficult personal subjects, and how these become cyclical in our minds. But I also wanted to talk about how walking or running can help release oneself from these cycles and find clarity and order from tangled emotional thinking patterns. It’s like discovering a new path from your usual running route, and how that can change your perspective and help find a type of peace and acceptance.”
Through the album, he goes on, there are motifs and melodies that repeat from one tune to another, which of course resemble cyclical thoughts and memories.
“So, to me,” Milo concludes, “this record is an exploration of the relationship between the complex, tangled world of one’s mental processes and how moving through the tangible world, especially through nature, can help find definition and clarity.”
As such, ‘Sierra Tracks’ really is medicine for the mind, body and soul.

Text by Milo Fitzpatrick

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Upcoming shows

Vega Trails Rotterdam, Lantaren Venster
Vega Trails Utrecht, TivoliVredenburg /Cloud Nine