Christina Alden and Alex Patterson: Hunter

Christina Alden and Alex Patterson – Hunter

Independent – 7 May 2021

When 2020’s lockdowns left two-thirds of the Alden Patterson and Dashwood trio largely isolated from the other third, Christina Alden and Alex Patterson put their minds to a project that had been on the back burner for a while. The result, Hunter, is an album made up almost entirely of their own compositions, mainly songs, with a couple of tunes. Christina and Alex share a passionate interest in the natural world and that provides a thread linking through many of the songs. Although never stridently activist, the lyrics are intentionally thought-provoking while the album’s lightness of tone, together with the often deceptive simplicity of the arrangements, have the power to transport you to the wide-open spaces evoked by many of the songs.

The album opens with the title track (the video for which premiered here), a song inspired by the wildlife photography of Finland’s Lassi Rautiainen. He’s documented a strange bond between a Grey Wolf and a Brown Bear, a bond sufficiently close that these normally solitary animals are prepared to hunt together. Stories in song such as this are the bread and butter of the album, we hear of the Greenland Shark, a vertebrate that can live for 500 years but spends all of that life in the ocean depths, or of an Arctic Fox making a 2000 mile migration from Norway to Canada. Human migration also features, intended in the case of Brooklyn, inspired by Colm Tóibin’s novel of Irish emigration, not an emigration forced by 19^th Century famines but a search for opportunities in the 1950s. The story in My Boy, is a tale of a decidedly unintended migration, of a sort. An Indonesian man swept out to sea during a storm and surviving 49 days adrift before rescue. In recounting these contemporary tales, Christina and Alex are very conscious of following in the footsteps of countless generations of folk storytellers, writing and singing of matters significant to their times. Few of their names have passed down through the years but with the songs on this album, Christina and Alex have earned a place in their ranks, hopefully with their identities intact.

Christina’s pure, high voice leads the singing but, right from the first chorus, Alex adds perfectly matched harmonies. Their two voices are ideally suited to interweaving these harmonies and at times it’s hard to tell them apart, you could be listening to a single voice, double-tracked. Alongside the voices, Christina’s guitar and Alex’s fiddle predominate but they’ve also raided the store cupboard, bringing out some of their less familiar instruments. Christina swaps guitar for banjo to lead the accompaniment to the album’s only traditional song, My Flower, My Companion and Me. Alex brings an almost full set of string instruments to several tracks, viola and cello supplementing his fiddle. The string section is completed by guest Calum McKemmie’s double bass. I was about to comment on how an absence of percussion has helped to cement the light, airy feel of the album. However, that absence isn’t complete, the final track, Reed Cutting, includes some gentle spoon taps and, according to the sleeve notes, knives. I’m not sure what sound the knives make!

As befits an album of the lockdown, recording took place in the cellar of Christina and Alex’s house in Norwich, with Alex in charge of production. The lockdown-induced quiet streets of the normally busy city centre making high-quality recording from microphones feasible. Indeed, both instrumental tracks, New Year Waltz and March were recorded live around two mics. Initial mixing was handled by Alex, while mastering was passed into the capable hands of sound engineer, Josh Clark. The CD is packaged in a numbered, recycled cardboard wallet handprinted with linocut artwork by Christina, a telling sign that the physical product is as much a labour of love as the music it contains, both giving a message of respect for and care of the natural world.

Several of the songs had been buzzing around their heads for a while, in the sleeve notes they write of “revisiting fragments of song ideas in old notebooks”. But it was Covid enforced isolation that gave them the time and motivation to turn them into the carefully crafted music that makes up this album. There’s not much we can put on the credit side of the Covid ledger but this beautifully realised collection of songs and tunes certainly belongs there. Christina and Alex performed as a duo before forming the trio with Noel Dashwood and the idea of a duo album never entirely left their minds. Working on that album has brought home to them how much they enjoy composing and playing together and, they tell me, that whilst the Alden, Patterson and Dashwood trio will continue, their primary focus for the future will be on their duo work.