Karine Polwart is back in the company of award-winning composer and sound designer Pippa Murphy and pianist and composer Dave Milligan on ‘Seek The Light’, a new EP and BBC Radio 4 series that starts this Sunday (27th August), combining a love of science, history, folklore and the natural world.
Anyone who follows the singer, storyteller and seven-times Radio 2 Folk Awards winner Karine Polwart will know that her love and fascination for the natural world have frequently inspired her projects. The notion to combine music, spoken word, natural history and science (ancient and modern) in a live performance was first realised in 2016. A Pocket of Wind Resistance was born through her own experiences, the history of her neighbours and local wetlands, and the inspiration of geese in flight. From festival to a fully-fledged award-winning stage production and later an album adaptation, the project took flight. Collaboration has always been a critical element of Karine’s work, and sound designer Pippa Murphy’s contribution to that stage production and studio album was immeasurable.
At the time, Karine told Folk Radio (read full interview here):
“Pippa and I have loads of friends in common, and we live only ten minutes apart. But I didn’t work with her until Celtic Connections 2016, when she scored string parts for a big Joni Mitchell inspired show I was co-directing, called Pilgrimer. She was superb, and we got on great. So when it came time to find a sound designer for the theatre piece, I thought of her. When we met to discuss the show, she took out her phone and showed me a photo of her wee kids leaping into Fala Flow, the wee Lochan on our local moor, which is the geographical heart of the piece. It’s important that we both really know and understand that place, and that we both make music with a perspective as mothers”.
As noted by Neil McFadyen in his album review: “Wind Resistance was initially inspired by Karine’s annual view of the migration of pink-footed geese to the Fala Moor peat moss near her home; and her wonder at their altruistic aerodynamic flying formation (the skein). Informed by her own experiences of childbirth and motherhood, a fascination for her local history and natural habitats, and a burning question about whether humankind can ever hope to emulate the spirit of cooperation shown by migrating geese, she has woven the landscape, its history, its inhabitants into a fascinating work.”
She is reunited once again with Pippa Murphy on Seek the Light, a new EP and BBC Radio 4 series which will be aired over four weekly episodes, beginning this Sunday, 27th August, at 1:30pm.
Seek the Light will transport the listener from the heavy heat of the tropical glass house in Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden to a wind-swept seabird island on Scotland’s east coast via the cratered surface of the planet Mercury.
Seek the Light marvels at the epic migration of the Arctic tern, the longest of any bird (Arctic terns migrate from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle—a round-trip journey of about 30,000 kilometres), in search of endless summer, and wonders how the lives of contemporary seabird scientists mirror those of the monks and lighthouse keepers who lived before them in the Isle of May, now a National nature reserve.
The series – a mesmerising blend of documentary, original music and spoken-word narration – begins with the story of the old Sabal bermudana palm that was the pride of Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden (RBGE), the oldest specimen in its living collection. Sadly, the plant’s desire to seek the light sealed its own fate. Its towering growth threatened to push through the dome of the garden’s iconic Victorian tropical glasshouse. On the eve of its felling in September 2021, Karine and fellow RBGE artist-in-residence, Pippa Murphy, hosted a ‘living wake’: a ceremony to honour the palm’s life and to acknowledge the grief of the gardeners who’d tended it.
It turns out, though, that the Sabal bermudana had been carrying a secret for its 200-year-plus life, one which speaks of colonial history and the ways in which greater than human life resists the containers we create for it.
Through song and narration, Karine and Pippa give voice to the palm tree, charting its long history and its relationship to the long lineage of gardeners who’ve watered, fed and pruned it over the centuries.
And she reveals its true identity.
To accompany the series, there are five new tracks as part of the Seek the Light EP written by Karine Polwart & Pippa Murphy and featuring Dave Milligan (who collaborated with Karine on her last album ‘Still As Your Sleeping’ which is reviewed here). In our interview with Dave and Karine for their ‘Still As Your Sleeping’ album, Karine spoke of working with Dave, another close neighbour:
“It just all felt very easy,” says Karine, “just the geographical proximity meant that it was really quite easy. I mean, it’s literally five minutes. It couldn’t be simpler to get to and from each other’s houses. We come at music from quite different places; Dave has an incredible formal training in music, his architectural understanding of harmony comes from a deep, deep place, and straddles both folk and jazz and really having a sense of how it works in a formal sense. I come from a totally different place; I can name maybe a dozen chords and not play them very well!
“I communicate about music like a writer, rather than like a musician,” adds Karine, “so I communicate in pictures. A lot of it is in visual imagery, and a lot of it is about drawing attention to what the lyrics are doing and the feeling that I want to convey, so I’m talking about it like a storyteller rather than a technician. But actually, it worked really great, because we never misunderstood each other. Despite the fact that we were using these different kinds of languages to describe what was going on. There were some delightful occasions where I’d be like faffing around, saying, ‘I want to see curlews’, and Dave would play something, and I would go, ‘Oh my god, that’s it! It’s like you’ve plucked it out of my head!’” Read the full interview here.
The EP will be released on Hudson Records on 7th October alongside a Seek the Light playlist featuring the EP tracks, some of Karine’s other music and more from her friends and favourite musicians, all inspired by science, history, folklore and the natural world.
The first single, Windblown (the Sabal’s last word), is released on 27th August. The original Seek the Light release was a Hudson Club Exclusive in April 2022.
BBC details of the series can be found here.
Links
Karine Polwart | Dave Milligan | Pippa Murphy