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art of the reason why You Are Wolf is on that edge is that, musically, she uses a loop station to create repeat- ing, rhythmic circles of sound. The result – unearthly, ethereal, sometimes synthetic music – locates her firmly in the contemporary. It’s unsurprising that her new album is coming out on Steven Collins’s Stone Tape Recordings. Collins, a former member of British psychedelic folk act The Owl Service, has always championed artists that swim in traditional waters, yet engage unusual approaches to the songs. Hawk To The Hunting Gone is Stone Tape’s best release yet.
“The album came about because of a live project,” explains
Kerry. She applied to Women Make Music, a funding scheme to support female musicians, and proposed a set of songs based on British birds and folklore. The initial project was also about explor- ing her loop station, developing those songs as a one-person ven- ture. “But then I also took [the songs] into another project I was doing with a classical group, Sound Collective,” she says. “So I rear- ranged them, and then there were two different l5ive renditions of them: the loop station one, and the classical one. Basically both versions found their way on to the album.”
Why birds? “I just always loved storytelling and folklore, and I was noticing how many birds cropped up in folksong. I wanted to bring the two together. I like how birds embody different emotions, and how they help tell a story.” There is also a person- al reason. “I was a member of the Young Ornithologists Club,” she says, referring to the junior division of the RSPB, launched in 1965. “There were three of us in that club in the area. I was there for a couple of years when I was about ten or twelve. I wasn’t a very good one [ornithologist], though. My brother was brilliant. He knew all the birds and I sort of trailed after him. But it has stuck with me, just knowing a little bit about birds and being able to identify them.”
The six traditional songs on Hawk To The Hunting Gone settle in alongside cover versions, two originals, and a setting of a poem, The Buzzard’s Heart, by Robin Robertson. You Are Wolf’s album is part of a proud tradition of concept albums about our feathered friends, from First Flight by Archaeopteryx, released by the RSPB itself in 1976, to Neil Diamond’s 1973 soundtrack album Jonathan Livingston Seagull, to Japanese noise artist Merzbow’s fifteen- album-strong set, Thirteen Japanese Birds (itself inspired by French composer-ornithologist Olivier Messiaen’s 1958 Catalogue d’Oiseaux). Bert Jansch invoked sea and wading birds on 1979’s Avocet. More recently, singer-songwriter Woodpecker Wooliams released The Bird School Of Being Human, seven original songs using birds as metaphors for dysfunctional human relationships; the compilation series Music And Migration brought together artists such as Vashti Bunyan, Sharron Kraus, and Lisa Knapp to explore avian flight patterns and support the conservation organi- sation BirdLife International; while Hanna Tuulikki, of experimental folk groups Nalle, Scatter and Two Wings is currently working on Away With The Birds, exploring the mimesis of birds in Gaelic song.
There is something nostalgic about birdwatching, and as mod-
ern as Hawk To The Hunting Gone sounds, a bygone hue is cap- tured on the album. Children watching and, particularly, listening to birds feels part of that style of patient, make-your-own-fun out- doors activity which has been increasingly swept away due to tech- nological changes and parental anxieties. Hawk To The Hunting Gone also evokes the wider sense of bird evolution and, perhaps, their endangerment – in both ecological and philosophical senses. “I had this lovely book called All The Birds Of The Air by Francesca Greenoak, which is a book about the regional lore of British birds. That was a really useful reference point for me. It tells you the regional names for birds that have been lost now, because they became standardised, particularly by the Victorians.” The quest to capture a bird’s meaning, while not holding too tightly to it else its fragile bones break, is a strong theme throughout the album.
“The cuckoo is a funny one,” Kerry says, speaking of the inspi- ration for the album’s opener, which brings together The Cuckoo and My Bonny Cuckoo in an optimistic first call of the season. “In folklore at least, the cuckoo is generally a very positive thing. It is a harbinger of spring. But we tend to think of them now as usurpers, getting in and chucking smaller birds out of their nests.” Indeed, a whole raft of curious superstitions are attached to hear- ing the cuckoo’s first call: if you roll in the grass when it sings you’ll be cured of backache, or if a young girl searches her left shoe when she hears it, she’ll find a hair of the man she will marry.
“Ravens are often very dark,” Kerry says, and traditionally the bird was assumed to be one of the forms assumed by the devil. They’re represented on the album by The Twa Corbies, where two
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