Alula Down (featuring Mark Waters & Kate Gathercole) release the latest in their Postcards from Godley Moor series today (Spring 2021) which can be ordered via Bandcamp here.
So we live on a hill, and we live in a strange time, and the time is stranger than we could have imagined. And for a while life was quiet. But the land around us was ripe and riotous, green and grey, rumbling woodland and bleating sunshine … blossoming life noisily coming and going, being and doing, treading into our home with mud on our boots, dangling from our clothes like grasses, itching and intrusive as pollen, suggestive and soft as rain.
Over the past couple of years our duo work with Alula Down has been focused on an exploration of traditional folk song through sound collage and manipulation.
Listening into our local environment through the quietness of successive lockdowns over the past year we started to weave music from the sounds around us. We made field recordings and then created montages, improvising our own musical language into the barking of the muntjac, the running of the stream, the coming of the storm.
In the early hush of the first lockdown, we explored for the musical pitches in the landscape – bees on the hawthorn humming in B, the wind across the hillside moving around C / C sharp, a lone car passing through the valley whining an A as it went.
And we started to play with the resonances, exploring into the depth and colour of them, singing old songs to the hill’s silence, finding new songs humming with its sounds, with the wind blowing from the valley, with the whispering of the rain. Bowed bass and harmonium chords mingling into the heavy grey sky and summer laden birdsong.
The sounds of the hill where we live are repetitive, meaningful, descriptive – and over the past months, our listening here has been as much about contact as creation. Listening brings us into relationship, even if that relationship is no more than an intangible suggestion. By listening we grow threads of meaning into our surrounding environment.
So we listened … playing back field recordings and improvising, our creativity the porous edge between us and the world around us, a place of tentative contact at a time when ‘distance’ was increasingly dominant – hands, face, space – in all our contacts with the other.
With the social isolation of successive lockdowns, we became involved in an unpredictable, sensory conversation with the real and vibrant world here on the hill, using the immediacy of improvisation as a tool to increase our participation and engagement. According to John Cage recordings of chance or unique moments in a musical performance have “… no more value than a postcard” – they simply convey the message that something has happened. Here it was both a musical performance and a deepening reciprocal relationship with the natural world. And the postcards – physical points of connection in an increasingly virtual environment.
Moving through this last year, marking each change in the seasons with another set of ‘Postcards from Godley Moor’, our music has become place-based. It happened here, perhaps it could only happen here. It intimately conveys our experience of this place at this time during the pandemic.
By the winter of 2020 – as the silence around us grew older, moving amongst us, filling the spaces where we couldn’t meet, accustomed to the space where we shouldn’t hug – we ourselves moved quietly back into the companionship of the trees. We watched the birds bedeck them with song, listened for their stories of deep time, and felt longingly for the silent pheromone chat exchange between them – as if this might also in some way connect us far and near, north south east west, with those we love and longed for in an immediacy of something real and felt.
And although there are now four seasonal albums sharing our journey through the past year, they feel like just a moment in time – in this strangest of times. They convey a place of musical exploration. A place of learning. A place where – stepping outside the backdoor, feeling the relief of the cool clear air, the physicality of the weaving birdsong around us, the touch of rain on our skin – we remember, just for a moment, that we are made of the same stuff as the rain and the trees.
Order Postcards from Godley Moor Spring 2021: https://aluladown.bandcamp.com/album/postcards-from-godley-moor-spring-2021
Postcards from Godley Moor Spring 2021 is released on Friday 4th June. The album was preceded by Postcards from Godley Moor Summer (The Guardian ‘Folk Album of the Month’ for August 2020), Autumn and Winter 2020 – 21. The album is released as digital download only accompanied by a strictly limited edition of 50 7”x5” art postcards. The collection of 8 cards are a combination of original text and artwork and are printed on 100% recycled, uncoated 350gsm unbleached card. Profits from the sale of the cards will go to Global Greengrants (www.greengrants.org/who-we-are/) supporting solutions for those whose lives are impacted by environmental harm and social injustice.