GREG HAINES

003. FEB2012. TALK.

“Maybe the people who listen to my music want to slow down and concentrate on the small details and aren’t afraid of the melancholic,” says Berlin-based composer Greg Haines.

Haines is 22, a self-taught classical musician from Reading with three albums under his belt. He’s been out of full-time education for six years and had a short career as a chef, spent two years in Manchester, and is now touring through Leipzig, Prague, Tokyo and Barcelona (Britain seldom offers the public funding he needs).

He fills his time listening to cellist David Darling, Hildur Gudnadottir’s “Without Sinking” and Gavin Bryars’ “Farewell to Philosophy”, as well as Joanna Newsom’s “Have One on Me” and Four Tet’s “There is Love in You”, not to mention the work of his friends, Peter Broderick, Dustin O'Halloran, Nils Frahm, Brian Mitchell, Erik Skodvin (aka Svarte Greiner) and whoever else hangs around Wedding, Berlin. He plays piano and cello.

Haines goes to gigs at Sophiensaele (www.sophiensaele.com), Ausland (www.ausland-berlin.de), as well as Stadtbad, Wedding’s converted swimming pool (www.stadtbad-wedding.de). He was so impressed by the acoustics of the Grunewald Church, an evangelical outpost in an affluent part of the city’s western reaches (www.grunewaldgemeinde.de), that he decided to record “Marc’s Descent”, a track from his latest album “Until the Point of Hushed Support”, while there.

“The length of the tail in the reverb in that church is stunning,” says Haines. “Every tiny sound is clear and you hear it from all around you. They also have a Boesendorfer, one of the most incredible pianos I’ve played in Berlin.”

For a self-confessed nomad dealing with cyclical patterns in his work (“I guess it all goes back to John Cage’s ‘repetition is a form of change’”) it’s perhaps unsurprising that one of his favourite books is Iain Sinclair’s “London Orbital”, a take on Britain’s “city of zones and freak shows separated from the rest of England”.

“I like the idea of walking in a circle and ending up where you started,” he says. “People are always driving around the M25 so fast, they have no idea what is around them. They don’t take in the hidden beauty that would normally pass them by.” (@robbiesharp)

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