> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.hwaelmag.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Gilroy Mere :: Furlongs - URL: https://www.hwaelmag.com/gilroy-mere-furlongs/ - Published: 2026-09-15T22:18:18.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-17T19:11:30.000Z - Description: Pastoral electronics, South Downs, Ravilious and train rhythms - Author: Hwael Mag - Tags: Album Reviews, 2026, Electronica, Ambient Folk, Pastoral, Landscape ### Furlongs began between St Leonards and Brighton. Oliver Cherer was travelling, but what ended up on the record was the landscape itself, arriving sideways, through glass, at railway speed. --- For six weeks in early 2025, Cherer made the roughly forty-mile journey to Brighton for radiotherapy, passing along the foot of the South Downs and seeing the Long Man of Wilmington twice each day. A laptop, AirPods and a small Korg keyboard bought in Portland the previous year turned those three hours of daily travelling into working time. On the train Cherer made beats, sequences and soft-synth sketches, transferring them later to his studio, The Laundry, in St Leonards-on-Sea. By the end there was around an hour of material; roughly twenty minutes disappeared in what he himself calls a “savage edit”, necessary to fit it onto an LP. It would be very easy to make the diagnosis the organising drama of *Furlongs*. Cherer himself resists that reading. He has said that he never felt seriously ill, had been reassured about recovery and regarded making music largely as something useful to do during the journeys. That refusal matters. The record does not ask illness to supply gravity that the music would not be able to provide on its own. Instead, an imposed route becomes a repeated act of looking. Eric Ravilious enters there. Cherer already knew the Downs from walking them and from family visits near Hassocks; he describes those hills as a natural geometry of folds, straight agricultural lines, chalk tracks, gates and hollows. Ravilious had responded to a very similar structure. *Furlongs* itself — the Sussex cottage rented by Peggy Angus, where Ravilious frequently stayed from 1934 — altered, according to the painter’s own recollection, his way of seeing and painting, because the colour and design of the surrounding landscape appeared to him with such immediate clarity. Cherer does something more interesting than composing ten musical postcards after looking at Ravilious watercolours. He takes that design seriously. [Furlongs by Gilroy Mere](https://claypipemusic.bandcamp.com/album/furlongs-2?ref=hwaelmag.com) This is one of the places where a label's cohesion and its pull actually get measured: a character that expands album after album, without imposing itself on the artists. Each remains coherent within its own musical language, introducing new developments with such naturalness that certain elements, although new, almost cease to register as such. They are already inside the landscape of the record, as though they had always belonged there. That continuity can also be heard in the materials. *Furlongs* remains immediately recognisable as a Gilroy Mere record: guitar, piano, synthesizers, electronics, keyboards occasionally recalling a Mellotron, and drums that in certain passages carry the movement slightly further forward. Clarinet, trumpet and flute belong to the same vocabulary and are introduced without creating fractures or marking a change of direction. Riz Maslen’s voice appears on only one track, but it is enough to introduce, for a few minutes, a more directly human presence, close to breath and everyday life. The initial device for the record was a major-scale arpeggio, conceived almost as a Möbius strip, capable of rising and falling without a proper beginning or end. Cherer associated it with the repeating undulations of the Downs; traces remain most clearly in “On the Road” and “Chalk Paths”. The railway adds another geometry: the hills move in waves while the passenger continues laterally through them. Repetition therefore feels less like a representation of landscape than a consequence of moving across it — or, more simply, what a melody ends up doing to itself after enough hours on the same train. GROUND SECTION / 01 SELECT A LAYER 01 ROUTE St Leonards / Brighton / railway 02 GROUND chalk / folds / tracks / gates 03 DEVICE laptop / AirPods / Korg / train 04 AFTERWORK The Laundry / edit / home recordings Repetition turns a journey into a working condition. For six weeks, the route between St Leonards and Brighton repeatedly placed the same stretch of the South Downs beside Cherer’s working time. The geometry was already present in the land. Chalk paths, agricultural lines, gates, hollows and the folds of the Downs supplied a structure Cherer already knew from walking before he encountered it again through the train window. The train became a temporary studio. A laptop, AirPods and a small Korg keyboard turned three hours of daily travel into working time. Beats, sequences and soft-synth sketches were made in transit, then carried back to The Laundry and developed there. The train sketches did not remain on the train. Material made in transit was taken back to The Laundry in St Leonards, edited and developed there; “Cuckmere Haven” and “Hope Gap” began later as looser piano improvisations recorded at home. WHAT REMAINS The same ground survives as route, remembered walk, recurring figure and terrain passing outside the glass. It is a distinction that makes *Furlongs* stronger than its premise might suggest. Ravilious has become far too easily a shorthand for a particular English taste — chalk, country lanes, muted greens, weather, well-mannered melancholy. His paintings are stranger than that reduction. Machinery, pylons, coastal defences and military equipment sit inside them with the same precision as fields and interiors; critics have long noted how readily his attention moved between agricultural debris, industrial objects and the Downs. Gilroy Mere’s electronic vocabulary belongs to this territory much more naturally than a respectful acoustic imitation would. “A Wet Afternoon”, “Furlongs 1”, “Cuckmere Haven”, “Walk a Line”, “Chalk Paths”, “In Winter”, “Hope Gap”, “Furlongs 23” and “Beachy Head” make the record read almost like a series of positions marked on a map. Two pieces, however, resist the train-made method. “Cuckmere Haven” and “Hope Gap” originated later as piano improvisations at home, recorded first on Cherer’s phone; recreating the loose timing of “Cuckmere Haven” in the studio proved difficult. > **The precision suggested by maps, rails and recurring arpeggios keeps encountering something that refuses to stay inside the grid.** Maslen also shares the writing credit on “On the Road”. Everything else is Cherer, with Antony Ryan mastering at RedRedPaw. The album was completed at The Laundry through summer and autumn 2025 and released by Clay Pipe Music on 4 September 2026. There is also a curious return to Clay Pipe’s own history. *The Green Line*, the first Gilroy Mere record made for the label, had already transformed transport into memory: suburban buses, journeys home, recurring melodic figures. Cherer now says that he tends to reuse themes when instrumental records are written quickly, allowing the same motif to develop in several directions rather than spending it once. *Furlongs* takes that method out of remembered transport and puts it onto an actual moving train. Its best idea may also be the simplest. Ravilious stopped and painted these hills. Cherer passed them again and again at timetable speed, for reasons that had nothing to do with painting. Neither experience cancels the other. The Downs survive as both place and figure. There are hills seen through a carriage window, the arpeggio that rises and falls, a chalk path known from walking — and, somewhere underneath all three, a painting, remembered while the actual terrain slides past outside the glass. The record was nearly called *Ravilious*. Clay Pipe and Cherer decided that would be too direct and chose *Furlongs* instead — Peggy Angus’s cottage, a precise address inside a much larger landscape, and probably the right call. *Furlongs* works best when Ravilious ceases to be its subject and becomes simply one among the people who looked carefully at that same ground before Cherer did. ---