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.
“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.
Previous releases in the seven-part musical series include:
The Well and the Flood, released 15 February 2019
From the Murk, released 15 March 2019
Song for Lost Childhood, released 25 April 2019
The Pathway, released 30 May 2019
The Stowaway’s Voyage, released 29 June 2019
Grasping the Wind is the sixth release and will be followed by the final instalment in the series, New Beginnings to be released on 22 October. The series aims to raise awareness of the power of music in times of loss.
Grasping the Wind, 23 September 2019
Composed by Douglas MacGregor
Performed by Douglas MacGregor
Director of photography E Zhang
He discovered the gem when he was 12 years old and still has it now, claiming it to be why he fell in love with music. He likes to play disc golf when he's not writing about music. He is a one-of-a-kind individual who is always the first to bust out his air guitar on the dance-floor.
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