Land Observations

Composer and musician James Brooks helms the indie/experimental outfit Land Observations. While pausing his work with prior band Appliance in the mid-2000s, Brooks devoted energy to visual art and mounted exhibitions at galleries throughout the U.K., North America, and Europe, all while pursuing independent music projects. Motivated by themes of travel and geography, he developed guitar-based pieces that looped and layered into dense yet spare arrangements, recalling Kraftwerk, Cluster, Brian Eno and Robert Fripp, Acid Mothers Temple’s Makoto Kawabata, and pop-inflected figures such as the Cure and the Durutti Column. Land Observations issued its earliest recording as the 2011 Roman Roads EP on Enraptured Records, pressed in a run of 500 copies. The project then aligned with Mute Records—likewise home to Appliance—and delivered its first full-length album, Roman Roads IV-XI, in September 2012, closing the year with several European performances. Further Land Observations shows in 2013 strengthened Brooks’ profile and prompted an invitation from actor/composer Simon Fisher Turner to join the realization of his score for the BFI’s restoration of The Epic of Everest, Captain John Noel’s 1924 film chronicling George Mallory and Andrew Irvine’s doomed bid to scale the planet’s highest peak. Drawing its title from the continental journey classically undertaken by prosperous university graduates between the 17th and 19th centuries, 2014’s The Grand Tour offered a more personal suite of pieces captured in a friend’s apartment near the Bavarian Alps.