Various Artists – The Lost Words: Spell Songs

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Various Artists: The Lost Words – Spell Songs

Folk by the Oak /Quercus Records – 12 July 2019

Looking out across the Pembrokeshire shoreline, artist Jackie Morris mixes her Japanese calligraphy ink together with collected saltwater in an open clay pot. A communion of seals watches on from a distance. Against a broad basalt stone face she writes:

“Go now selkie-boy, swim from the shore, Rinse your ears clean of human chatter, And empty your bones of heather and moor, And your mind of human matter”

The lyrics of Selkie-song begin to fill the smooth, quartz-veined tablet. This ‘Spell Song’ conjured here by our ‘sorceress of the brush’ is the co-creation of another shamanic scribe – Robert Macfarlane.

Back in 2017, the pair published The Lost Words, an astonishing tome of poem-spells and watercolour illustrations, seemingly overflowing with the same beastly energy as that of the supernatural board game Jumanji. This all-ages encyclopaedia of sorts set out to reclaim everyday words – such as acorn, heron, conker and kingfisher – after their removal from the Oxford Junior Dictionary.

 

Folk Radio first covered this cultural phenomenon at the end of last year and in February at the Southbank concert. Since then, it has continued to amass fans and accolades (most recently winning the Kate Greenaway Carnegie Medal) moving ever closer to its grassroots goal of reaching every single school and hospice in the country. What’s more, thanks to Folk By The Oak  (where it will be performed again on Sun14th July at Hatfield House, Herts) project manager Neil Pearson and commissioners, Caroline & Adam Slough, The Lost Words is now finally reaching us in the form of Spell Songs, an accompanying record, which has been composed by eight of folk’s finest contemporary talents: Karine Polwart, Seckou Keita, Julie Fowlis, Kris Drever, Jim Molyneux, Kerry Andrew, Rachel Newton and Beth Porter.

 

Selkie-boy (‘A Summoning Spell, A Drowning Song’) was recently released as a single and our seafront introduction sequence was lifted from its music video (watch below). It would seem the spell was written with Julie Fowlis in mind. Fowlis who joked during the London leg of the sell-out winter tour that “a Gael is happiest when they’re sad”, was immediately drawn to the spell’s heartbreaking beauty and its relation to Hebridean folklore, herself greatly inspired by the ‘songs and tales of the seal people’. One of the legends surrounding these ‘half-creatures’ was that they were ‘believed to be former human beings who voluntarily sought death in the ocean’.

This mythology of skin shedding is certainly a compelling notion. It’s stirred our collective imagination for millennia and Morris and Macfarlane have both mulled the idea over, like a pebble rolled in the palm, exploring it further through their own art. A proud champion of JA Baker’s The Peregrine, Macfarlane once described the ornithologically obsessed classic as “not a book about watching a bird, [but] a book about becoming a bird”, before reasserting thirteen years later it’s, in fact, truer to call it “a book about failing to become a bird” – “Baker craves to ‘think like a falcon’ but also knows he cannot slip his form or quit his species”. Acknowledging this in the penultimate chapter of The Wild Places Macfarlane writes:

 

“Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal’s holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare’s run, the hawk’s high gyres: such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise that live by voices inaudible to you” 

 

Transmogrification is obviously out of the question then. Stuck with ourselves and tied to our actions as a race, it’s beginning to dawn on many of us that the decisions we make today will come to affect all life on earth. Although beast and man alike share the risk of becoming endangered, humans actually stand in a position of being able to do something about the approaching threat. Thoughts of wayward escapism are by all means understandable, but withdrawal altogether cannot be the answer.

 

A naturalist would probably surmise that nature presents us with a rather extraordinary form of ‘escapism’ anyway (although they might not refer to it as that). Our appreciation of all creatures, with their ‘world-within-a-world’ wildness and untouched wisdom, results in a very real, vital awareness of our place on this planet. Through our similarities and differences, we find something to treasure and we make our response through art and action.

 

Now, if any pod of professional musos were rumoured to be able to tune into those ‘inaudible’ voices that Macfarlane referred to it would have to be our Spell Song singers. It’s the sensitivity of this little ecosystem of an ensemble that makes this record what it is. There seems to be a deep communion here between each player (as well as with the subject matter of course – as you can see from a quick scan of each individual’s discography). The group evidently shares the same contagious awe that pours from the pages of The Lost Words.

 

Besides who needs shapeshifting when you can have the next best thing? “Each person has about them something of the creature,” responded Morris in our interview earlier this year. With this in mind, she painted every artist’s instrument with his or her corresponding bird in gilded gold leaf, ready for the CD’s 112-page book. As a fan, it can be fascinating listening back to these fourteen tracks as you attempt to trace the animalistic traits, those visceral characteristics, which make the players and arrangements here so unique.

 

The tentative creep-in of Heartwood – a new ‘charm against harm’, written in response to the mass felling of trees across Sheffield – opens the album. Polwart’s exquisitely expressive voice hopes to cease the swing of the cutter’s axe, as she prays we consider the beat, break and weep of the heartwood. The short-and-sweet spoken-spell Conker (Magic Casket) and Newton’s Acorn don’t fall far from the tree in comparison either, with the latter reaching grand climes against a busy soundscape of beating wings.

 

As we progress a sharp freeze sets in as the spectre of Ghost Owl comes into frame. Inspired by the barn owl’s ‘hush of the hunt’, Kerry Andrew’s supernal melody lingers in suspense above a veil of padded harmonies, recalling the trip-hop cool and steady pulse of 9bach’s most recent album, Anian. The Snow Hare follows stalking out a passage across the Scottish highlands, as it struggles for shelter and camouflage, longing to become traceless and one with the snowdrift once more. The bold two-pronged delivery of Polwart & Fowlis is heavy with a sense of forewarning, their blended voices reaching a minor clash in the last verse, as desperation truly sets in.

 

There’s a rare meeting of mother tongues on Papa Kéba (which translates as Elder Father) as Fowlis and Keita duet in Gaelic and Mandinka. Keita presents an ancient playing style on the track (which apparently he seldom performs) as the pair band together to stress the importance of keeping alive a culture’s minority language. “You need to dig to find the old words,” writes Keita.

 

Bethany Porter then displays enough charisma to give the goldfinch a run for its money on Charm On, Goldfinch. Gambolling by with a whistled intro tune, whistle accompaniment, plucked-uke, and epic harp and string sweeps, it’s pleasingly reminiscent in its way of Milk-Eyed Mender era Joanna Newsom, as well as Andrew Bird & Kate Staples.

 

The soft-pedalled, brushes shuffle of Willow streams by with a similar riverbank ease to that of steady midfielder, Scatterseed. “Lean in, oh listeners” beckons Newton against staggered harmonies and a harp-on-kora backdrop on the former. Drever, with a nostalgic nod to his youth, evokes scenes of the “fallen star of the football field” on the latter, backed by a wistful string motif.

 

Kris and Seckou’s impressive acoustic/kora interplay opens Kingfisher with Fowlis reciting the spell as the rest of the collective dart in and out of view; ideas and parts in quick collide. A half-whispered “kingfisher” refrain builds to a mantra outro, “Halcyon, sets the stream alight. O Rainbow bird” reminding one of the pastoral calm of Mutual Benefit. It’s bookended by the wildlife audio recordings of Chris Watson. His captured birdcalls seem to swell, becoming more prominent as the song closes out as if anticipating the following two tracks.

 

“(Heron’s) melody was created out of the swinging rhythm of the cow as it walks; the rhythm mimics the action of the bird marching on top of the cow” says Keita of the record’s fourth featured song. This swaggering image quickly takes hold as the ensemble’s panned vocals sweep in from every angle – rising in formation toward a climactic chorus – Seckou’s powerful voice high-diving overhead.

 

Little Astronaut (inspired by the Lark) might tie for title place alongside The Lost Words Blessing as arguably one of the albums most touching moments. Molyneux describes it as a “nod to all voices – small or great, loud or lonely – who (…) sing their hearts out at all dark matter” his tone sweet and solemn is distinctly different to Drever’s lilting Lau-like plea of “right now I need you”. The Lost Words Blessing closes, unfolding like a lullaby but with a deeply moving undercurrent that truly stops you in your tracks. “We offer it both in hope and light, and in grief for the losses and dark times yet to come,” writes Polwart.

 

Just as our initial image of green ocean spray threatened to wash Jackie’s record of the Selkie-song clean from the beach face, so too entire species are in danger of being dashed against the rocks. “Whatever will come next will start by being imagined. It’s being imagined somewhere already right now” suggests Karine, “And these fledgling imaginings, as they emerge, will undoubtedly be dismissed also as impossible, unworkable, unfeasible, as all change is until it happens” – Spell Songs proves testament to this. What was once a lone idea, nurtured and given wings, is now a mass murmuration of ‘fledgling imaginings’, liberated by a like-minded band of dreamers.

 

Overall the residing feeling after The Lost Words Blessing fades to silence is one of hope. Somewhere in you, there is now a flicker of faith, burning slightly stronger than before, that seems to say this inspiration, this careful appreciation could just be our redeeming salvation. “Look to the sky with care my love” – there really is no telling how much ground these songs may cover.

 

The Lost Words: Spell Songs is released on 12 July.

Pre-Order via Folk by the Oak (CD Book| Double LP). Tour posters and original artwork by Jackie Morris are also available.

You can also order your tickets for Folk by the Oak on Sunday 14th July at Hatfield House, Herts at which you can watch Spell Songs being performed live alongside many more great artists.

https://www.folkbytheoak.com/tickets-shop/

 

Photo Credit: Elly Lucas

Artwork: Jackie Morris