Tag: Spell Songs

Again commissioned by the Folk by the Oak Festival, In Thin Air is the third collective project by Kris Drever, Karine Polwart, Julie Fowlis, pianist Jim Molyneux, Beth Porter on cello and ukulele, viola player Rachel Newton and kora maestro Seckou Keita and is, once again, a homage and musical companion to the work of artist Jackie Morris and conservation author Robert Macfarlane. This time round it draws on his ‘The Book Of Birds’, a love letter to birdlife and a call to halt its loss. Throughout the book, seven chapters explore The Seven Wonders of Bird (Nest, Egg, Beak, Song, Feather, Flight and Migration), covering 49 birds on the RSPB’s Amber or Red List, among them the Avocet, the Yellowhammer, Gannet and Nightingale, and the album follows the same flight path, looking to deepen connections between the human and avian worlds and the role of birds within not only our daily lives but art, language and folklore too.

Moving from nest to migration, it opens with the low murmuring title track with piano and whispered words, guitars, strings and percussion gradually joining, capturing the sound of a starling migration, moving then to Polwart’s ‘Make Your Heart A Cradle’ which, anchored around a C sharp drone with shimmering electroharp, piano, viola and overlapping vocals, speaks of nest building (“Theek it with bark and baler twine and meadow grasses… Weave it with reeds and plastic threads and shredded paper”) in a call to “Pray to the feathered ether/Pray for the not yet born/Pray for a steady shelter from the storm”.

That follows logically into the brief choppy Senagalese rhythms of ‘Njan’, or ‘nest’, connecting the need of birds and humans alike (artists especially) for a safe place to create, the Mandinka lyrics translating as “We all seek a place for retreat/Small shelters/From the world’s thunder”, spilling over into Molyneux’ quietly pulsing cello-warmed piano instrumental ‘Nest Building’.

From nest it moves to egg and beak with the stripped down ‘A Life Begun’ (“In bird a fragile casket forms/Coloured in abstract and wild calligraphy/Holds its breath until you’re born/And there’s a strength in its fragility/Through shell you hear your mother’s cry”), written by Macfarlane and sung by Newton, the words echoing her development of Pregnancy Associated Osteoporosis that at birth and subsequently saw multiple fractures of her spine. Keeping hatching in mind, sung in Gaelic by Fowlis, initially unaccompanied, and published in ‘Aithris is Oideas’, a collection of traditional Scottish Gaelic rhymes, in 1964, ‘An Calman’ translates as ‘The Dove’, here speaking to her newborn chick.

Dedicated to Ahmed Muin Abu Amsha whose Gaza Birds Singing project brings Palestinian folk song and instruments to children in displacement camps, sung by Polwart with Drever on harmony, a conservation message sounds with the gently hushed ‘Bells Fall Still’; all the species mentioned to be found in Gaza, it speaks directly to the album title in its refrain “it’s not enough to love the song if you forget the singers”. Sung initially acapella by Fowlis before being joined by Keita and his kora, with added viola ‘Tàladh nan Eun’, or ‘Lullaby of the Birds’, is a traditional Scottish lullaby fused with a Mandinka proverb about when birds and children alike eventually fly the nest.

The Flight chapter comes next, led by the tinkling piano and shimmering electro harp instrumental ‘Feathers’, fluttering into Fowlis’s ‘Fallen Feather’ which, anchored by Polwart’s hypnotic guitar riff, draws on the swan in the Gaelic tradition, sometimes a messenger associated with grace, beauty and peace, sometimes a soul under enchantment, the feather symbolising “A soul that didn’t enter heaven/A breath, a voice, a call resounding/A drifter of the go between… To grieve and guide you through the twilight”.

Molyneux and his brother grew up on a Lancashire farm in Littleborough and ‘Ride The World’s Winds’ draws on how, when they were young, they found a lifeless sparrow and buried it with due reverence under a drystone wall in the meadow, marking the spot with a gravestone that exist to this day, the song, lifting phrases from the book, capturing his imagination of what it must be like to fly free as a bird (“The curlew wing beats in her winter-sea voyage/Sparrowhawk scorches as arrow from bow/The harrier drifts over heathery moorland/As Earth is unfolding below”). The chapter concludes with ‘Flight’, a soaring four-minute instrumental built around electroharp, strings and piano, the final section opening with the instrumental ‘Migration’ with its drum-led murmuration melody, repeated ‘you’re flying away’ phrase and whistling.

The penultimate offering is Drever’s ‘Senegal’ which, coloured by kora, traces the flight of the bonxie or great skua from his Orkney home to winter on the African shores, the earworm refrain “I put one foot down, then the other/You feather the nest, high on the stone/Like one brick upon another/You keep on moving and call it home” clearly mirroring human migrations.

It ends with Porter’s ukulele-shaded ‘We Only Save The Ones We Love’, a contemplative musing on the ever-shifting baselines whereby each generation inherits a new normal in regard to the nature vanishing around them, becoming accustomed to what we have and forgetting what has gone, a mindset that, as the title has it, tacitly encourages an acceptance of extinction.

The physical album coming in a box that holds a hardback book featuring newly commissioned Morris artworks, photography by Elly Lucas, song notes and lyrics as well as mini-essays by Macfarlen, Fowlis and Polwart, it’s a thing of aesthetic and musical beauty that deserves to feather a nest in your collection.

Mike Davies

Artists’ website: www.thelostwords.org/spell-songs

Do let us know when a video becomes available.