Watch the video premiere for Mayfair at Rhayader 1927, a track from Toby Hay’s new album The Gathering to be released on 29th March 2017 via Cambrian Records. Both the tune and video are ‘wondrous and uncanny’ as the album notes reveal.
The tune is inspired by archive footage of the Rhayader Mayfair now held in the National Library of Wales. The footage is wondrous in its atmosphere, but also uncanny – for this is a very familiar place, glimpsed at a time that is out of reach. (Robert Macfarlane / Toby Hay)
The award-winning author Robert MacFarlane, whose writings on landscape and the human heart have inspired many, had this to say about the album:
“I first listened to The Gathering late in the day, late in the year – the year of Trump, of Brexit, of tides of darkness rising fast on all sides. And for a bright hour, Toby Hay’s music cast strong light, fought the shadows back a little. The tracks of this album – quick-fingered, deep-felt – open landscapes in the mind’s eye. It feels, listening to them, as if they have a little of the power – the power that linguists call ‘illocutionary’ and magicians call ‘conjuring’ – to summon things into being, or bring pasts briefly back to life. It came as no surprise to learn that Toby has sometimes hoped that the playing of ‘Starlings’ (in which the notes teem and swoop and swarm) might one day call up an actual murmuration. Place, memory, nature, loss and dreamed-of geographies are the subjects of this beautiful music: that gathering of feelings that go by the untranslatable Welsh word hiraeth. There is a sadness at what has gone here, but not a nostalgia. The world’s dew gleams on this music, but the world’s dust swirls through it too.”
Robert Macfarlane
The Gathering is released on 29 March 2017 via Cambrian Records
Pre-Order it here: tobyhay.bandcamp.com/album/the-gathering-2
Toby will be touring extensively throughout the UK and Ireland in support of the release – details to be announced soon.
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Pre-Order The Gathering via Bandcamp: tobyhay.bandcamp.com/album/the-gathering-2