Vega Trails - Sierra Tracks
I enjoy taking long walks at the end of the day. The softening light of the summer sun is a soothing tonic for many ills. I often carry binoculars, pausing to observe the wildlife that emerges with the dusk. Earlier this week, I spotted a Kestrel hovering over a field, head anchored, wings playing against the wind, suspended high above its prey. Watching it through the optics, I felt momentarily outside of myself, motionless in contrast to the inertia of my everyday life.
In our overstimulated world, this kind of stillness is increasingly elusive. Nature, of course, offers us one pathway towards it. Music can offer us another. While listening to Sierra Tracks, the new release from Vega Trails, the cinematic, chamber-jazz project helmed by composer Milo Fitzpatrick, I felt that same kind of meditative suspension. The album, inspired by the foothills of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains just outside Madrid, where Fitzpatrick has lived since 2022, feels like a deep inhalation of wide-open sky. With its sweeping strings, plaintive reeds, and shimmering vibraphone, Sierra Tracks plays as a love letter to a landscape and a personal meditation on movement, experience, and the art of letting go.
On the new record, Fitzpatrick draws deeply from the rugged terrain that surrounds his Spanish home, expanding on the skeletal palette of his 2022 debut Tremors in the Static. On Sierra Tracks, he incorporates this wider array of instrumentation to evoke the vastness and solitude of his environment. Each composition unfolds like a calming journey, sometimes grounded in earthy motifs, other times dissolving into dreamlike abstraction.
With the album now out in the world, we caught up with Milo to learn more about how Sierra Tracks came together and the ideas that shaped it.
Photo Credit: Milo Fitpatrick by Kela Coto
Hi Milo, where are we finding you today?
I'm at home in San Lorenzo, just north west of Madrid.
Your new record Sierra Tracks is steeped in the geography of the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains, how did these landscapes influence your writing on the new record?
The shape, colour and smell of the mountains is very emotive. I like to take running hikes at dusk, and when you're out on your own surrounded by the towering rocks and forest, as the earth and sun put on the swift moving light show from pinks to purples, there is a feeling of being strikingly alone but also connected with everything. I think I just wanted to write music to go with these moments and feelings.
The new album sounds even more epic than your previous release Tremors in the Static. How did you approach that expansion in the sound without losing the intimacy of the project?
Tremors in the Static was supposed to be much more epic, but because of Covid restrictions I had to keep the players to a minimum - which turned out to be a rewarding process in itself. But in the live show now, with the expanded ensemble, it is fun to develop some of those compositions into a grander texture.
So in a way with Sierra Tracks, I went through the same process of writing for bass and lead wind parts, but this time i didn't have to hold back with people and parts and could explore new textures and back drops, as well developing lead parts for new instruments too.
Your collaboration with Hania Rani seems like it had a big impact on the project, what did you take from your conversations with her and how did this help shape the record’s direction?
Once I had finished most of the writing and recording, I needed to lay down the strings parts I had written, but I didn't immediately have the players or studio. Around the same time Hania was about to record some of her film compositions in Warsaw and offered me to share the session with some of her players and use the studio too. So she just helped me with the logistics of finding all the players I needed, helped with some translation in the session (although most of them spoke perfect English) and navigate the amazing Polish Radio Studio in Warsaw.
Photo Credit: Milo Fitpatrick by Kela Coto
You have reacquainted yourself with the cello after a number of years, what was it like rediscovering that voice, and what did it allow you to express that perhaps has been missing from your work?
In a way, some of my cello playing has been kept alive through bowing the double bass throughout the years. But upon recently picking up the cello again, I quickly realised how much more nimble and expressive i could be with the left hand, due to it being a smaller instrument, and how I had the potential to play the melodies in my head, to which formerly I would had delegated to Jordan [Smart], through one of his wind instruments. So not only did the possibility of writing for a lead string instrument arise this time round, but also to have the chance to play these parts myself, and phrase them exactly how i wanted (most of the time) was a real step for me.
You’ve described this project as partly about escaping cyclical thought patterns through movement, how did that idea translate musically?
Throughout the record there is theme and variation. Not so much in the strict classical sense, but the same melodies and motifs do come up in different tracks, with new timbres and contexts acting as their backdrop.
This idea of context was quite important to me; how one can move through time carrying the same emotional baggage (reflected through motifs) yet with the context of space shifting (timbre), you can approach thoughts differently, and also vice versa.
For example, to help myself escape negative, cyclical thought patterns I would often go for a walk in the mountains, and through just letting my body have other experiences through the senses I would be able to slow my mental pace down, float outside myself briefly and just ask myself 'stop, wait, where is this going?' and just by virtue of this interruption would I allow myself to gain a semblance of balance again. Sometimes there is no resolution, but I find moving can help the death spiral.
Did making this album change the way you think about your relationship to place or to yourself
I think I have always been acutely aware of how sensitive I am to my surroundings and the people (perhaps too much so) and it has, and i think always will, play a huge part in shaping and influencing my work. But I have never had a specific place have such an influence over me, or indeed create a bulk of work in honour to my feelings towards it. In many ways I feel I could travel the world and just write music in reaction to my experiences in different places. But if anything I think I've just learnt how much I need nature in my life. It grounds me and lets me free.
Finally, what do you hope listeners feel or experience when they spend time with Sierra Tracks? Is there something you’d like them to carry with them after the music ends?
Well first, I would just hope they are not bored, and that it makes them think or feel of something. But I never really wish to prescribe what a piece of work should make one feel. For me, when writing this record and upon listening to it again there are feelings of joy, melancholia, yearning, release, and love for this beautiful, strange and at times very challenging journey through life on planet earth.
Sierra Tracks by Vega Trails is out now via Gondwana Records.
