Hildaland is the new project from Orkney-born fiddle player Louise Bichan and American mandolinist Ethan Setiawan. The duo have featured on Folk Radio as members of the four-piece outfit Cornerhouse when we premiered their single Mag’s 21st last year.
They have already released two singles from their upcoming debut album Sule Skerry, which is set for release on Friday, 3rd November, and you can hear the latest, Trains/Fin’s, in our Regular Folk Playlist. Their third single is the traditional Orkney folk ballad The Selkie of Sule Skerry. I’m sure most folkies are aware of the mythological creatures known as selkies (more on below), while Sule Skerry (Sula Sgeir) is an uninhabited Scottish islet in the North Atlantic, 18 kilometres west of Rona, which is probably most known for the controversial guga hunt. Guga is the Gaelic name given to the Northern Gannet chicks, considered a Ness delicacy. Thought to be a 400-year-old tradition, ten men from Ness embark on a journey each year, spending two weeks on the uninhabited rock, sleeping in stone huts amongst ruins left by Celtic monks a thousand years ago. It is the only seabird hunt still licensed in the UK (the hunting of sea birds was outlawed in 1954) and operates under a special licence issued by NatureScot that allows the annual taking of 2,000 birds. In 2020, the hunt was cancelled due to COVID-19, then again in 2022 due to avian flu. It was cancelled again this year due to bird flu and following concerns over the dwindling numbers of Western Isle sea bird numbers. The Guga Hunters of Ness has featured before on Folk Radio – Robin Beatty of The Old Dance School wrote the song ‘Sula Sgier’, inspired by the ancient ritual he first witnessed as a five-year-old boy (more here) and The Dead Rat Orchestra performed a score for the BBC Documentary The Guga Hunters of Ness (Read more).
This folk ballad has nothing to do with Gannets – instead, this is a tale of shapeshifting. Shapeshifting crops up regularly in folk songs; most recently, we spoke of shapeshifting hares (read about Rosie Hood’s new single Lyddie Shears) and how such instances also crop up in old lullabies (see the news piece on Abigail Lapell’s Lullabies album).
On The Selkie of Sule Skerry, Hildaland take the traditional, dark lyrics of a haunting Orcadian ballad and pairs them with a brand new composition, bringing a much-loved ancient story up to date for new ears while maintaining its heart. It tells the tale of a woman who has her child taken away by its father – a great selkie of the remote, rocky island of Sule Skerry who can transform from a seal into a human.
The song builds steadily into an electronica-Celtic fusion sound, with complex production and powerful vocals. Joining Louise on fiddle, strings and vocals and Ethan on mandola, electric mandocello, and strings are Sam Kassirer on synth and Dan Klingsberg on double bass, bringing depth and resonance to the track and adding to its atmospheric feel. A large part of Hildaland is taking traditional material and greatly reworking it into something new. They do this incredibly well, as you can hear on ‘The Selkie of Sule Skerry’, also our Song of the Day.
Louise Bichan said: “I have always loved the old folklore tales I was told growing up in Orkney. We wanted to play around with the melody and come up with something a little different, so we put it in a minor key and we had fun arranging strings and backing vocals to really build the track. I love when a song builds in a way that you almost don’t notice it’s happening, until it’s really big and you realise it’s the same song that started out so small. As I was showing the song to my folks, my mum was really tickled – she used to sing a version of it with a friend when she was growing up in Moray, playing in the folk clubs.”
The Selkie of Sule Skerry was recorded and mixed at Ethan’s home studio and was also self-produced.
The single will be available to stream and download on all major digital platforms from Wednesday, 25th October 2023. For more information, visit www.hildaland.com.