London-based musician and composer using the power of music to process grief releases sixth single in a series of seven.
Douglas MacGregor, award-winning composer and guitarist, was 7 years old when he lost his mother to cancer.
Twenty-five years later, having been anchored only by music throughout his teens and twenties, MacGregor finally succumbed to grief; the result of which is Songs of Loss and Healing, a seven-part instrumental series, with accompanying music videos, which takes the listener on MacGregor’s personal journey of delayed grief.
The sixth instalment, Grasping the Wind, is released on 23 September and is about remembering someone departed. Listen to the instrumental here
“To know a lost love and to rekindle a forgotten world through music is one of the ways I continue to process my grief,” said MacGregor speaking from his home in London. “This is a piece that expresses and celebrates the intangible sense of someone lost who can nevertheless live on in some form through music.”
Grasping the Wind was recorded and filmed around Grafham and Ellington Thorpe, in Cambridgeshire where MacGregor grew up and where the memories of his mother are strongest.
“I have so little direct memories of my mum,” MacGregor explains, “but she was always ever present. Sometimes I would think, if I were to lay down in the field behind our childhood home, and let the land speak, that perhaps the memory of her warmth and love could be blown in on a breath of wind.”
Grasping the Wind is part improvisation, part composition and brings elements of folk, classical and experimental guitar music together in what has become known as MacGregor’s signature style.
Each instrumental takes a different perspective in time, articulating a specific mood, which MacGregor hopes others who have experienced loss can identify with and use to guide them through their own grieving process.
Jem Girl at the Piano 