Garefowl – Cliffs
Penny Fiddle Records (PFR2004CD) – Out Now
After numerous attempts, I’ve concluded there is no single sentence that comes anywhere near to giving Cliffs the introduction it deserves. So, if it seems a while before I get around to writing about music, please bear with me, it will be worth the wait! Garefowl, the band, and Cliffs, the album, are the brainchild of Ewan Macdonald, a fiddle player you may have come across over the last few years as a member of the Band of Burns. Ewan has a family connection to St Kilda, a small archipelago in the Atlantic lying roughly 40 miles further west than the westernmost inhabited island of the Hebrides. The last permanent residents of the largest island, Hiort (Hirta in English) were evacuated in 1930 and Cliffs was, in part, conceived by Ewan and his father, Murdo, to mark the 90th anniversary. There is a far older St Kildan anniversary to be marked in 2020, and again, Ewan has a family connection. In 1840, an ancestor, Lachlan MacKinnon, was one of the group of fishermen who killed the last Great Auk in the UK, a flightless bird up to three feet tall and known on St Kilda as the Garefowl.
So now we’re up to speed on the reasons that lay behind the making of Cliffs and the origin of the band name. As yet, Garefowl is a band in name only, along with so much of the music that’s been made in 2020, the contributions of each of the seven members had to be recorded separately. Fortunately, five of the seven, Ewan, Stuart Graham, Chris Jones, Jess Whelligan and Nathan Bontrager have a shared history, they’ve played and recorded together for several years as Root & Branch. Garefowl member number six, Richard O’Flynn, besides adding synth, vocals and percussion, was also responsible for mixing and producing the album. Number seven, Spiff Wiegand, is usually something of one-man-band but, on Cliffs, limits himself to adding jaw harp on three tracks. Equally deserving of a namecheck is Cally Yeatman, an artist based on North Uist. Her six-panel work, The Living Wall – Guillemot Cliffs, provides highly appropriate artwork for all four faces of the album sleeve and the covers of the enclosed booklet.
With five of the band playing together as Root & Branch, it’s no surprise that the two bands’ approaches to arranging and playing traditional music have much in common. Tradition sits at the core, in terms of both source material and instrumentation but for Garefowl they’ve assembled a fascinating array of less traditional instruments. At the more conventional end of the range, there’s fiddle and viola from Ewan, cello from Jess, bouzouki from Stuart and mandolin, banjo and concertina from Chris. To these they’ve added Spiff’s jaw harp, Ewan brings in harmonium and bowed banjo and Nathan contributes viola da gamba (looks somewhat like a fretted cello but is really very different) and erhu (Chinese two-string stick “fiddle”). Ewan, Richard and Jess are all credited with devising the synth sounds that are present on all the tracks and, finally, Stuart, Richard, Ewan, Jess and Nathan all handle vocals. With this cornucopia of sound sources available to them, the band has produced music that defies any simple description. It’s richly textured, it’s subtly layered, it is, by turns, both lively dance tunes and a pitiful lament.
The album’s eight tracks consist of five that are the band’s arrangements, largely instrumental, of traditional St Kildan songs. The few vocal lines that remain are generally peurt-a-beul, mouth music, so any stories told by the original lyrics or otherwise associated with the song have to be outlined in the album’s booklet. The remaining three tracks were composed specifically for the album, one by Ewan, the other two by his father, Murdo Macdonald.
The album opens with one of the traditional arrangements, Hion Daila Horo Ri Ho Hion Daila Là. There’s no translation of the title, it isn’t Gaelic, its sound is intended to imitate a variety of seabird calls. The line is repeatedly sung, or perhaps chanted is a better word, as a chorus to the developing melody. A melody played initially on fiddle, backed by percussion and jaw harp and gradually joined by almost their entire armoury of instruments. Only the banjos, erhu and concertina being held in reserve. While the original chorus aimed to imitate bird calls, Garefowl make use of their synths to add sounds that are perhaps a little more convincing. This is the first example of a continuing theme. The synths are used on most tracks to mimic not just bird sound but also sea, wind and, to create effects, notably on Pink Sandals on the Street, that could have come straight from Pink Floyd. The electronica, though, never comes close to predominating. The melody, from whichever instrument is currently taking the lead, most often a fiddle, and the ensemble playing that complements it, are always to the fore, anchoring this music to its traditional roots.
Pink Sandals is easily the liveliest piece on the album but some of the traditional pieces, Hion Daila… and Cas Na Caora Hiortaich O also focus on the lighter side of past life on the island. But that life could be undeniably tough and unyielding and the album’s other traditional songs, from the 18th and 19th Centuries, document this. In particular, Cumha Hirteach, which can be translated as St Kilda Lament, has, in its original form, lyrics that tell of a mother’s grief for a son who fell to his death while collecting eggs from the cliffs. A harmonium drone overlain by bowed banjo, strings and concertina doesn’t need the addition of words to awaken those emotions in the listener.
Equally powerful is the closing track, the second of Murdo’s compositions, A’ Fàgail Hiort (Leaving Hirta). Murdo spends time on Hiort as a volunteer, the island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, owned by National Trust for Scotland. Clearly, with his Hiort heritage, leaving the island at the end of a stay is a sad time, a feeling he’s captured perfectly with this piece, written on the boat while sailing back to Harris. Contemporary accounts relate how, on the boat that evacuated the last 36 residents in 1930, their spirits were high until the islands disappeared below the horizon, then tears began to flow. Murdo’s composition is able to capture these mixed emotions and express them using the pared-back sound of fiddle and viola with the synth providing the background.
This was an ambitious project to put together, even more so to attempt it during 2020’s lockdown. All the contributors to Cliffs deserve our thanks and congratulations. They have produced music that effortlessly evokes the sights and sounds of the remote, rocky, seabird havens that make up the St Kilda archipelago.
They’ve then packaged it with artwork and an explanatory booklet that completes a truly satisfying album. I’ve stood on the shore on North Uist looking out to sea in the direction of St Kilda, just that 40 miles or so of sea between us. I never expected to make the trip, but this album has given me a mighty big incentive to try.
Cliffs is out now. Order via Bandcamp here: https://garefowl.bandcamp.com/album/cliffs
More here: http://garefowl.co.uk/
We also featured Garefowl in our Folk Show, Episode 82 here: https://klofmag.com/2020/08/folk-show-episode-82/