“Interests I used to see as very separate from my creative practice I now see as connected. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one very big thing.”
here I am briefly is a six-track collection of short works created by guitarist Zahrah Hutton across 2024-2025. Through improvisations, performances of scores, electric guitar, loop pedal, and voicenote recordings of train stations and train journeys, Zahrah describes the record as “the self-portrait of a frequent traveller, never in one place for long enough, and yet for a short while present in a moment where all one can do is look out of the window and listen” — weaving a beautifully liminal sound world, moving seamlessly between stasis and perpetual motion, sometimes at the same time.
Zahrah Hutton is a British-Pakistani guitarist, artist, and composer from London, based in Birmingham. In both her compositional and visual practices, her work often explores repetition and balance within structures, communication, and the relationship between form and sound. From August 2024 to January 2025, Zahrah was an Artist in Residence at Stirchley Printworks, a print studio in South Birmingham. As a member of the Mela guitar quartet, Zahrah has performed in America, Canada, Norway, and across the UK including live on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune, and released an album of original arrangements, ‘Overtures & Dances’, with contemporary classical label TRPTK. She plays electric guitar, keyboards, and objects with DIY ensemble Body Loud, and performs and improvises on acoustic guitar, lute, and banjo with experimental community theatre company A Book of Portraits. Zahrah is a graduate of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and a Britten Pears Young Artist 2025-26, for Composition, Alternative Performance, and Performance Art.
We asked Zahrah to take us through the compositional process of here I am briefly, discussing voicenotes, train travel, working with friends, Joni Mitchell, and more…
‘here I am briefly’ is music about train travel.
Growing up in London, trains provided freedom and agency to start going to concerts, spend time in the city with my friends, and attend school and music lessons by myself. While at university, the extent of that freedom grew, and I routinely made solo visits to new places, to go to art galleries or see live music. In my third year, some friends and I travelled to Koblenz Guitar Festival in Germany by train, a route I nearly identically replicated three years later to travel to the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. As a graduate, for two years I travelled between Birmingham and London once a week to rehearse with the Mela guitar quartet.
The source of the album’s title is completely unrelated to train travel; it is the translated title of a 1938 collage by Bruno Munari, ‘Eccomi in breve’, a surreal self-portrait that I saw on display in the New York MoMA in March. Playing on multiple meanings, the phrase encapsulates the hours I routinely spend on trains. Taking “briefly” to mean “in brief”, the album is a succinct self-portrait of a frequent traveller, a portfolio artist best represented by the time I spend moving between the different aspects of my life, between projects, between jobs. Taking “here” to mean “the destination”, the album holds the sadness of never being in one place for long enough, often splitting my time between Birmingham and London. Primarily, I take the view that “here” means on the journey itself. Here I am, bound for a short while, in a moment where all I can do is look out of the window.
The idea of train travel can hold a romantic excitement. Often there is something wonderful at the destination: trains remain the easiest way for me to see my family and the majority of my friends, I have visited many beautiful places by train, I greatly enjoy rehearsals. But the reality of train travel is often discomfort. I habitually find myself running for trains, sleeping on trains, eating both lunch and dinner on trains, getting crushed on the London Underground, feeling nauseous, feeling tearful.
The album features six tracks, each at varying degrees of proximity to that rough-around-the-edges reality. Most tracks make use of voicenote recordings or archive samples, which gives a coarseness to the overall sound. I like the immediacy and personality of voicenotes, so not much has been done to disguise the hiss or imperfections. Working directly with audio recorded quickly on my phone gives everything equal weight — I interact with sounds I hear and enjoy at the railway station the same way I interact with sounds I hear and enjoy when playing instruments at home.
Some tracks began as improvisations, some I had already created and released on Soundcloud. Once I had recorded Fogsignalling, I felt I had enough whereby releasing them together might add some greater throughline to them as individual pieces. The title track was the last to be finished.
From Darmstadt to Mainz to Köln
This piece began as an open score, composed as I was travelling back from the Darmstädter Ferienkurse with James McIlwrath and Cassandra Miller. On the train from Darmstadt to Mainz, the three of us spent a while listening to and identifying a pattern of chimes being produced in combination by the tannoy and the doors opening, coupled with the low hum from the rails and a high tone from the carriage. I wrote out the score on the train from Mainz to Köln.
I like creating scores that leave a lot of freedom in how they are assembled or realised, mostly because I am constantly awed and enamoured by what my friends will create within a framework I might give them. In my improv/experimental ensemble Body Loud (James McIlwrath, Vato Klemera, and Lia Joy), I know everyone’s playing well enough to know the kind of voice they will bring, but I could never predict or replicate what they might do, which is why I love working with them all so much. I originally wrote this score with them in mind, but it became something more defined, and in the recording each cell is repeated at regular intervals.
The sample is a voicenote of a train arriving, recorded much earlier in the year, gradually put through a resonator, so over the course of the track the rumble of the train forms a sustaining chord.
The accompanying hand-drawn animation was created by my sibling Basil Hutton.
This is a Platform Alteration
This was the first track from the collection, created in April 2024. Here, the humming drone chord is the original material on the voicenote; the platforms at Birmingham New Street station often hum and resonate with very defined pitches. Also captured on the phone recording is me and James McIlwrath picking out the different notes we can hear, humming and then singing along.
James is one of my favourite collaborators; the way he views not just organised music-making settings but navigating life in general has hugely inspired how I create work and how I listen to sound. Interests I used to see as very separate from my creative practice I now see as connected. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one very big thing.
During the time I was working on this album, James and I devised and performed a set of ‘Bit Pieces’, a meditation on the human desire to communicate, an expression taken from the nautical flag code phrase “I desire to communicate with you”. The pieces furthered a generative structural process James had already been using to make his 2023 album, and drew upon international non-verbal languages including Morse code, semaphore, and telegraphy prosigns, alongside material from music workshops I had done with young children. Creating this set was the first time I felt really encouraged to call upon what I saw as disparate aspects of my life, from guitar-playing to free-improvising to teaching to listening to the Shipping Forecast, to strengthen something I was creating.
Moor Street
This is the first improvisation on the album. It is a voicenote recording of my amp, as I play electric guitar with a slide and a loop pedal.
I have recently become very interested in stamp collecting, which led me to the archives of the GPO Film Unit. The idea that the UK Post Office would commission new music, poetry, animation, and documentary film in aid of the promotion of Post Office services is such a fascinating Modernist vision that now seems so foreign. I wanted to create something reminiscent of these films, documentary-like narration over looping, sloping phrases comparable to a surreal Len Lye animation. The audio comes from a 1930s instructional film about Absolute Block Signalling, the semaphore signalling used on railways.
The work I created as part of the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme for Composition, Alternative Performance, and Performance Art (CAPPA) course looked more into stamp collecting, and will be performed at the Aldeburgh Festival in June 2026.
Fogsignalling
The inspiration for this track came from a 1960 British Railways instructional pamphlet that I purchased in an antique store in Ilminster in September 2024: For Signalling Trains during FOG or FALLING SNOW and arrangements in Periods of Frost. The pamphlet details the uses of railway detonators, or fog signals, small explosives which are attached to the train tracks and emit a loud bang when driven over, thereby issuing warning, caution, or emergency messages where signals cannot be seen. I was very taken by the image of fog or snow so dense as to obscure vision, punctuated by frequent small explosions.
The detonator sounds were made by hitting the strings of the guitar. I wrote the chords at the piano, so they were incredibly awkward to shift between, which introduced a lot of extra noise. I love the creaks, scrapes, and echoes that come from playing guitar; as a concert classical guitarist I do work (to a certain extent) to minimise these extraneous sounds, so it is nice to make them feel welcome in other avenues of playing.
Here I am Briefly
This track begins with another voicenote of a loop pedal improvisation, and then switches to a fuller, re-recorded version. Although I could happily sit with the looping chords and slide guitar for much longer, conceptually I wanted to create something fleeting; it arrives and builds to something full but is gone very quickly.
I took the original photo for the album artwork in 2024 at the National Railway Museum in York.
Fogsignalling (demo)
I chose to include this track, a voicenote of myself playing through the chord sequence for Fogsignalling on piano, because of the unintentional warping and compression from placing the phone directly on the piano lid. It offers a softer version.
I bought my current electric guitar a few years ago, and I chose it because it was a Larry Carlton signature model, the lead guitarist on Joni Mitchell’s 1976 album Hejira. Perhaps the greatest album ever to exist about travelling and being a working female musician, Hejira sees Joni seek proximity to a masculine idea of genius by going electric, and employing an all-male, all-star band. Ultimately, her attempt to make an “androgynous” music fails, as Hejira documents experiences that are so irrevocably enmeshed with gender roles.
This framing of electric guitar as emblematic of music that should be taken seriously, as somehow more important because of its undeniable historic tie to masculinity, hugely resonated with me when I first heard it. Despite owning an electric guitar and playing in my bedroom since I was about fifteen, the instrument seemed unapproachable, inaccessible, for a long time. It was continually presented as something you were only allowed to do if you already knew everything about it. Now, I am a firm believer that the only thing you need in order to play an instrument is access to producing a sound on that instrument. All the guitar-playing on this album was done without a pick, with very classical technique. Ending with a piano track felt in keeping with the playing across the collection, always trying to play and record in a way that prioritised achieving the sounds I was searching for over any imposed limitations of doing things “properly”.
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Stream and download here I am briefly on Bandcamp here:
Learn more about Zahrah and her practice:
- https://zahrah-hutton.com/
- https://soundcloud.com/zahrahhutton
- https://zahrahhutton.bandcamp.com/
- https://www.youtube.com/@zahrahhutton
- https://www.instagram.com/zahrah.hutton/
header photo by Ellie Koepke
