Love Songs to Wild Earth
“This new collection of songs has been over three years in the making and is our first compositional collaboration since the Exile album in 2007. We are now in our twentieth year of working together and we decided to celebrate this journey by writing music that would express both our huge gratitude and our ever-deepening love for the wild land in which we live and create. So we travelled to the untamed edges of landscapes that, in different ways, were singing to our souls – the western highlands and islands of Scotland, the Atlantic coast and mountains of Ireland and the far northern Siberian tundra. We listened to wind and water and the silence of places that are remote from human hearths; we gathered up threads and fragments of melodies and words from ocean and high loch and deep valley and ancient migration routes; then we brought these threads home and wove them into the Dartmoor landscape that we wear inside our bones. We also chose two older songs that have represented key moments in our Dartmoor lives and reworked them for this collection. Here are the songs that we made upon the wild earth’s loom.”
Weaving the Land may best be described as ‘ancient folk’ music: gentle and pulsing songs that have been intentionally formed in ways that depart from the flute and drum-led pieces for which Nigel and Carolyn are well known. Some of the melodies are drawn from Nigel’s recent work Dartmoor Symphony and spun anew; some songs reach forward into new as-yet-unformed strands of work. The album was created on many old and traditional instruments, including ten stringed instruments: piano, Celtic harp, violin, cello, guitar, salterio, bowed and plucked dulcimer, Hungarian gardon, Shetland lyre and hurdy-gurdy. Hand-carved wooden flutes, tin whistles, small pipes, skin drums and percussion (including herding bells, sled bells, reindeer toe and bone rattles) were also used to create the landscape of melodies on which these songs were laid.
WEAVING THE LAND
MOON AND MOSS (Mother Ground)
MOUNTAIN WINGS (I’ll Sit Inside The Sky With You)
STILL WAITING TO BE HEARD (Old Weaver’s Dance)
HERON VALLEY (Daughter Song)
IVY SPELL (Then Sip Soft Darkness)
SHE DRAWS THE DREAMERS TO HER
GREY DOWN STONES
NOT ONLY THE RIVERS RUN FREE
SA LEY YAV (Tundra Love Song)
DUSK AND DAWN (A Nocturne)
FOREST YARN (Where Will You Lay Your Bones?)
FARE YOU WELL (Heron Fly You Home)
Nigel Shaw: piano, flutes, small pipes, various stringed instruments, percussion. Carolyn Hillyer: vocals, gardon, drums, percussion.
Guest musicians: Emily Burridge (cello), Pat Orchard (guitar) and Paul Sax (violin).
