Green Vinyl re-press + download. Originally released October 2019.

Inner Roads and Outer Paths is Herefordshire born Vic Mars’ third release on Clay Pipe Music. It follows last years ‘The Soundtrack To The Hospice’ commissioned by Gideon Coe for BBC 6 Music, and 2015s critically acclaimed ‘The Land and the Garden’.

Inspired by in part by Alfred Watkins words and photographs of Herefordshire, the record also harks back to a period in Vic’s youth spent exploring the abandoned houses and factories on the fringes of his home town; the in-between places where nature either takes back, or loses its grip. On a recent visit home, he found a new road cutting through the fields he had played in as a child, and realised that some of the older pathways and lanes had become lost or overgrown. It is a record of trails, roads and holloways, that lead you out along the river, through ruined arches and over railway lines, past crumbling stately homes and back into the centre of town.

The album was recorded with 1980s style ‘tracker’ software, and a collection of instruments that includes alto recorders, school glockenspiels, a Roland Juno 60 and a Korg Monopoly. He manages to merge the wow and flutter of orchestral sounds from vintage British cinema documentaries, with Freddie Phillips style acoustic guitars and sequenced analogue synths. ‘Inner Roads and Outer Paths’ is a lush beautiful record that magically captures the Hereford landscape of Vic’s youth.