Hollow Land
Hollow Land captures a fleeting but resonant moment in early 2025 when two long-time friends found respite at a small cottage in the South Downs: a pause from the noise, a return to something elemental.
Daniel Elms and Adam Blyth each speak through distinct musical languages: personal dialects shaped over more than two decades of composing, performing, and listening. Their bond, however, runs deeper than sound: both grew up in the northern coastal city of Hull in East Yorkshire, and were shaped by the post-industrial landscapes and the rites of passage that accompany life on England’s working edges.
Their shared past carries the ghosts of what William Blake so acutely branded ‘these dark satanic mills’, those vast monuments of former industry that still dominate the valleys of West Yorkshire. Like the Pyramids of Giza or the Colosseum in Rome, these hulking structures loom disproportionately over the modest infrastructures that have grown around them. They are unromantic ruins, weathered carcasses of industry; symbols of labour and poverty, ambition and decline; reminders of the strange beauty found in the post-industrial pastoral.
With Hollow Land, Elms and Blyth wander through these visual contradictions. It is programmatic music that manifests an autofictional Yorkshire, a wilderness superimposed upon by magical realism. This becomes a metaphor for their collaboration, a map drawn by two players who explore the unknown terrain between their individual musical languages.
The result is a work that is deliberate, primordial, yet pastoral; a meditation on friendship, distance, and return. Hollow Land is a record of two artists finding their shared territory; a landscape marked by sound, memory, and play.
