Our Tune of the Day comes from the boundary-bending iyatraQuartet. On Black Seas, they take inspiration from the late British Poet Laureate, John Masefield’s poem Sea Fever – but quite unlike anyone has done before. After watching the accompanying video, directed by Andrew Spicer and produced by Fairholme Films, the ‘grey dawn breaking’ mentioned in the poem takes on an entirely different feel to anything you may have mentally visualised upon reading the poem before.
Drones and percussion build an other-worldly introduction as they each rise from the sea at a funeral-like march to a processional clarinet line. The combination of black and white imagery and the contemporary setting of graffitied sea walls seem oddly at home with the primitive and ancient feel of their actions. Certain lines from that poem resonate well with those images…
iyatraQuartet have captivated audiences at WOMAD, Songlines Encounters Festival, Bloomsbury Festival and Oxford University Museum of Natural History and are recipients of the inaugural Kennedy-Kolodziejski Award, presented by violinist Nigel Kennedy. iyatraQuartet are supported by PRS Foundation’s Open Fund Award.
Black Seas is from their forthcoming 2020 release Break the Dawn which is set for an April 2020 release. The single is available to download now via Bandcamp: https://iyatraquartet.bandcamp.com/track/black-seas
iyatraQuartet are:
Alice Barron – violin/vox
George Sleightholme – bass clarinet/vox
Rich Phillips – cello/vox
Will Roberts – percussion/vox