In a follow-up to their 2019 release of Hollowbone, last month, Kathryn Tickell and The Darkening returned with Cloud Horizons. Today, we have the pleasure of sharing Kathryn’s new video for Caelestis, one of the many standout tracks from their album.
In capturing a sound that effortlessly conjures the past whilst simultaneously referencing the present and future, Tickell and the Darkening have created a rather unique and striking soundscape.
Billy Rough, Folk Radio
Kathryn’s band, The Darkening, are Amy Thatcher on accordion, synth, clogs, and vocals, Kieran Szifris on octave mandolin, and Joe Truswell on drums, percussion, and programming. Joining them for Cloud Horizons are Cambridge-based Stef Corner on vocals, lyre and sistrum, and the Isle of Lewis’s Josie Duncan on vocals and clarsach.
Talking about Caelestis, Kathryn tells us:
Amy and Stef take the vocals in Stef’s new treatment of Latin words from around 1900 years ago, inscribed on a stone found at Carvoran in Northumberland. The mentions of Syria and Libya reflect the diversity of the troops stationed along Hadrian’s Wall at this time.
The words you can see in the video are rendered from photographs of the lettering on the actual stone at Carvoran, dated around 1900 years ago.
In a follow-up interview with Kathryn, she spoke about how her Northumbrian roots remained at the album’s heart.
“I think it would be pretty difficult for me to try and do something that has no sense of those roots because they’re so deep in me and also in the instrument that I play. Whatever you play on Northumbrian pipes, it’s going to have that essential sound of the instrument.
“With The Darkening, there’s those connecting threads that really have always run through everything that I’ve done, which is the music and the people and the place – the landscape and the people that are working and living in it. Those three things have always been inextricably linked. With The Darkening, it’s exactly the same thing, but the people tend not to be living people.
“I’ve always tended to look at tunes from within the last 200 years, but with The Darkening, I’ve made a conscious decision to go further back. The whole point when we first started the band was to go back to Hadrian’s Wall, and it was the Roman wall that really sparked it off – that was my totem.
“When you live in the shadow of Hadrian’s Wall, it’s so present everywhere you go, not just in the wild landscapes, but driving into Newcastle, right down the west Road, Hadrian’s Wall. It’s just there. Also, Kieran (Szifris) and Amy (Thatcher) live in Wallsend, and obviously, that’s very wall linked. But the thing that set me off in the first place was discovering that it wasn’t just Roman soldiers from Rome, or from Italy, but that you had all of these people from the furthest flung reaches of the Roman Empire. People from Syria and Lebanon. You had different troops coming from different areas, lots from North Africa, and the fact that for a couple of 100 years, their whole lives had been transplanted into the wildness that was Northumbria; that really blew my head apart. Thinking that at that time, this little strip of land, across from coast to coast, was probably the most multicultural part of Britain. I just loved it. I found that so exhilarating and exciting. And of course, you have the advantage that all the music, whenever there is a bit from 2000 years ago, nobody has a clue what it sounded like!”
You can read the full interview here:
Cloud Horizons is out now and available to order via Bandcamp (CD/Digital): https://kathryntickell.bandcamp.com/album/cloud-horizons
Upcoming Live Dates
Mon 16 Oct Apex, Bury St Edmunds
Tues 17 Oct The Stables, Wavendon
Wed 18 Oct University of York
Mon 23 Oct Gala Theatre, Durham
Tues 24 Oct Waterside Arts, Manchester
Wed 25 Oct St George’s, Bristol
Thurs 26 Oct Cecil Sharp House, London
Fri 27 Oct Ludlow Assembly Rooms
Tickets: kathryntickell.com