Today marks the release of Douglas MacGregor’s new album Songs of Loss and Healing. While his name may be new to some of you, he has collaborated with plenty of well-known musicians who have featured here on Folk Radio including the likes of Alex Nielson (Alex Rex/Trembling Bells), Toby Hay, Jim Ghedi, Stanley Brinks, Alasdair Roberts and Eric Chenaux.
For a change, Douglas has stepped out from the shadows for this new release, an all instrumental, classical-tinged landmark work about grief, love, loss, death, yearning for the irretrievable, and, also, hope.
To mark its release, we are premiering the video for album track Grasping the Wind. The video opens to a lines of text from Henry Scott Holland’s ‘Death the King of Terrors’which was read in 1910 following the death of King Edward VII. Despite its title and historical context, the words have a lot to offer, ageless wisdom. The extract reads:
“Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still.”
On Grasping the Wind:
Grasping the Wind is about reconnecting through music to a lost past, to departed loved ones and a sense of self in that time and place. MacGregor lost a whole way of life at seven years of age when his mother died, and he moved away from his childhood home in rural Cambridgeshire. One day woke up and had the sensation that if he lay down in a Cambridgeshire field that the sense of his mother and the beautiful childhood he spent with her could rustle through the grass on a breath of wind. Like an aeolian harp, the guitar tries to grasp that feeling and hold onto it long enough to know it fully.
While this may be wordless, it’s all the stronger for it, some things can’t be said in words and are best left to the power of music to convey them, Douglas MacGregor achieves that to great depth here.
“evocative, urgent, and extraordinarily beautiful” Alex Neilson (Alex Rex/Trembling Bells)
MacGregor lost his mother to cancer when he was just seven and with that a whole way of life. But it wasn’t until twenty-five years later that the suppressed grief of this world over-turning experience brought an emotional collapse that submerged him for almost two years. Throughout this time, music was the guide and lifeline, the method of making sense of the unfathomable.
He wrote seven pieces and then chose different non-studio locations over the UK – with a specific meaning to the pieces – to record and video each. He then consecutively released each performance online with an accompanying exploratory text.
MacGregor found inspiration in his ethnomusicological studies of ancient musical practices in grief rituals around the world. The act of researching, writing, travelling and recording became a ritual in its own right – an attempt to recreate the healing tools of religious systems through music. It was also a form of therapy and, no less, an artistic endeavour.
MacGregor’s act of researching, writing, travelling and recording became a ritual in its own right – an attempt to recreate the healing tools of religious systems through music. It was also a form of therapy and, no less, an artistic endeavour.
MacGregor envisions the music operating on multiple levels simultaneously, “With this project, the line between art, ritual and therapy completely vanished becoming one and the same. The listener can hear the music solely as a piece of art and relate to it freely, or delve deeper into the story, meaning and transformative nature of each piece.”
For this album release, MacGregor worked with German sound engineer Sebastian Ohmert to recapture these pieces in all their sonic beauty, while retaining all the immediacy and intimacy of the original recordings.
These are songs without words, music from the deep, each piece an unpremeditated manifestation of love and loss. MacGregor’s writing, poetic and evocative, conjures images. His pieces are delicate and moving, sombre, soothing and hopeful in equal measures as well as frequently breath-taking.
Order Songs of Loss and Healing via Bandcamp.
https://www.douglasmacgregormusic.com/