Georgia Ruth is all set to make a return with her new album Fossil Scale on October 7th via Navigator Records where she’ll find herself in good company with the likes of Jon Boden (re-issue of Painted lady) and Heidi Talbot (Here We Go 1,2,3). Listen to lead track Doldrums below:
Talking of The Doldrums, Ruth says;
The Doldrums was one of the first songs I wrote for the album. I’d just moved to Caernarfon, and had become totally transfixed by the view out over the Menai Straits (a narrow stretch of tidal water about 16 miles long that separates mainland Gwynedd from Anglesey). It was absolutely beautiful. But there was something that felt ominous, something to do with the stillness of the water. And this sort of chimed with how I’d been feeling; the sometimes disconcerting stillness of being happy! According to people who sail, the doldrums are a sea-state of mild inactivity, stagnation. It’s caused by low pressure and heating at the equator. My dad was in the merchant navy as a young man, and he confirmed that the looming threat of those parts of the Pacific sea are really unnerving. Coleridge has this amazing description of them in the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner: “Day after day, day after day, we stuck, nor breath nor motion; as idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”
It was back in 2013 that the Welsh singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist released Week of Pines (review here), which won the 2013 Welsh Music Prize (nominated alongside records by Neon Neon, Sweet Baboo). She was also a nominee in the 2014 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards (for ‘Best Traditional Track’ and the ‘Horizons Award’). Last year she took part in The Beyond The Marches / Dros y Ffin project which brought together six contemporary folk musicians from Wales and England to create new work from the national archives of the two nations. We covered the project in-depth here.
Fossil Scale finds her switching out her previous go-to writing tool – the harp – for a piano in search of a more expansive yet ambient sound. Georgia headed into the familiar setting of Snowdonia’s Bryn Derwen Studio in January 2015, to lay down the foundations of what would become Fossil Scale. When the sale of the studio just 5 days into recording threw plans awry, recording time was then split between studios in London and Cardiff – in the case of the latter, at friends and collaborators Manic Street Preachers’ Faster Studios (Georgia sung on ‘Divine Youth’, a track that featured on the Manics’ Futurology album). The album was finally pieced together in Mwnci Studios, co-produced with Italian producer Marta Salogni (Phil Selway, Eliot Sumner) and long-time collaborator David Wrench (Caribou, Bat For Lashes) some 11 months after those initial sessions began.
UK live dates to support the release of Fossil Scale are expected to be announced shortly.
Pre-Order Fossil Scale via:
Also available to pre-order via Amazon | iTunes