Please welcome Alasdair James Dodds to our blog. Alasdair Dodds is known for his composition and piano performance work as a British composer and pianist. His musical journey began at a young age of 11 when, due to his struggles with dyslexia, he had to rely on learning piano through self-practice on the pianos available at his school because learning through a teacher wasn’t very feasible for him. Just off the press is his new single, “Disillusionment”, supported by an amazing video that dropped on 27th September. The track and video together feel almost confessional, inviting us into a space where expectation collides with reality. Let’s take a closer look at “Disillusionment” and the story this song and video are unfolding.

The song begins with a delicate piano melody that sucks the listener right in from the start. There’s a quality of effortless draw, a sort of quiet gravity, and the sound itself is just breathtakingly beautiful, so it has a sensual, intimate tone from the outset.

The duality of the human experience is metaphorically represented in the video through color-coding. The orange represents the flickering light of our present feelings and thoughts, while the blue represents the weight we bear from the past and the foundations. Dodds implies that disillusionment is a descent into reality rather than a “crash,” by picturing the music as a continuous downward motion. It is the process of removing ornamentation to reveal an object’s underlying structure. The video’s “beauty” is found in its mathematical accuracy; it serves as a reminder to the audience that, even in times of extreme loss or perplexity, the human heart has a quiet, glowing rhythm and an underlying order as it adapts to reality.  There is complete darkness at the start of the video. This emptiness is a metaphor for the actual state of disillusionment, where long-held beliefs have disappeared. Abruptly, the top of the frame starts to lose light. These are the visual “notes,” which show up as long, glowing orange and blue bars.

The colored bars gradually move downward towards a horizontal line at the bottom of the screen as the piano melody starts. The melody (right hand) is represented by the orange bars, and the grounding bass notes (left hand) are represented by the blue bars. Their gradual decline, which resembles rain or falling embers, represents the impending arrival of a challenging reality. Each bar illuminates a circular “key” and produces a tiny, shimmering ripple when it hits the bottom line. The “impact” of realization is represented by this, the video’s most human moment. The abstract music feels tactile thanks to the visual feedback, much like a drop of water hitting a still pond and permanently altering its surface. As the complexity of the composition increases, so does the extent to which “the screen is filled with a dense waterfall of light.” The effect of “so many bars cascading so rapidly creates an overwhelming sensation.” This is a direct reflection of what it is like to be “disillusioned” to feel “the mind is flooded with too much information to be processed” when “the patterns of one’s former life are being rewritten in a new reality that is necessarily more complex. Towards the end of the video, the density of the particles begins to decrease in intensity. This indicates that the spacing between the particles becomes wider, represented in the video as the distance between the musical notes played, with the trailing glow of the musical bars taking time to disappear into the blackness of the background. The remaining musical notes start being played in seclusion towards the end of the video.

Creating and sculpting the sound of this solo piano piece required the better part of twelve months, so with all due respect, the following pieces are the product of a rather long-drawn exercise that is based on the principles of patience and precision. The time and effort that have gone into the creation of the solo pieces that follow have primarily been based on an exercise that aims to address the nuances of note resonances, the tuning of minute variations within the patterns of time, and the velocities that are associated within the spaces that are covered while playing the keys, to create the desired sense of depth and poignancy that listeners will resonate with. For Dodds, composing music always remains about so much more than merely creating the composition itself. It’s reflective, it’s thought-provoking, it’s intensely personal, a journey of discovery where each note brings about its own surprises along the way.

This is far more than a musical composition accompanied by a visual image. The composition is informed by Dodds’ view of his world, a place filled with concepts, facts, and images that are obscured by illusions and misconstrued by misinterpreted information. Really, this work reflects the universal passage through disillusionment, the moment of truth wherein we come to understand that something or somewhere is not so true, so good, so meaningful as we once thought it to be.  That stripping of illusion may be painful, even profound, but it often leads to a clearer vision of people, of situations, of the world itself. I truly enjoyed listening to this music and viewing this video in tandem with it. Dodds is an extremely skilled artist, and I would look forward to working with him again very soon.

Stream the “Disillusionment” on Spotify and watch the video with the above link

Follow Alasdair here and his socials: Instagram, YouTube