Traditional music has long provided otherworldly raw material for classical composers, from Vaughan Williams’ cherry-picking of English folk tunes to Steve Reich’s borrowings of Balinese drumming. Linda Buckley is a contemporary composer from County Cork with a track record of doing unusual, interesting things: her previous releases include a luminous green limited-edition cassette of Moog compositions and a song cycle about the supernatural feminine in Irish folklore.
For her debut album proper on NMC (the contemporary classical label that helps emerging artists put together their first collections), she combines these interests with a deep dive into the ancient art of Irish séan-nos singing, a style of ornamented solo lines that moves slowly and measuredly, like a tide slowly soothing its way towards the land. Buckley’s vocalist is Iarla O’Lionaird from US/Irish folk group the Gloaming, whose tender, unwavering voice handles these songs about love and loss, stemming from ancient Gaelic poetry, with directness and care.
Buckley creates an immersive sound-world of electronic and acoustic drones behind him. Irish contemporary chamber group Crash Ensemble add the soft scrapes of their bows on cello and violin strings. Together, they conjure an arrestingly melancholic mood, a sonic impression of erosion smoothing a seabed, and of change being as inevitable as it is imperceptible. The second half of the album moves away from traditional material (Discordia could be something from the armoury of Aphex Twin) but when Exploding Stars returns folk drones to conjure up the cosmos, it’s clear how much Buckley deeply connects her past to her present, opening up possibilities for our mutual musical futures.
Also out this month
Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet & Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger (Smithsonian Folkways) is a timely political release amplifying the multicultural connections around the folk singer’s work. It includes songs Seeger played in concert (Hindu devotional Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram; Spanish civil war song Jarama Valley, here sung by Maria Arnal) and songs by other people that continue his legacy of combining protest and poetry, such as Zoe Mulford’s The President Sang Amazing Grace, sung beautifully here by Meklit Hadero.
Donald WG Lindsay and Richard Youngs’ History of Sleep (Good Energy) is gorgeous, slumbering stuff, marrying the 18th-century bagpipe music of Northumberland with Youngs’ shimmering guitars. Lovely too is Mary Lattimore’s Silver Ladders (Ghostly International), produced by Slowdive’s Neil Halstead, inspired by the Cornish folklore surrounding his Newquay studio, as well as Lattimore’s ongoing explorations of the sonic possibilities of her harp.
