Martin Green
Album: Crows' Bones
Label: Reveal
Tracks: 9
Website: http://www.crowsbones.com

The maverick and wildly inventive accordion virtuoso from award-winning trio Lau here bestows his name to a unique artistic collaboration which presents a bold and imaginative concept offering that pulls together various strands of primordial folk culture in a compelling and superbly eerie sequence of dark songs centred upon death, songs that inhabit the realms of ghostly antiquity. Though intensely haunting in nature, the music might however also seem something of an acquired taste, at least at first, for its determinedly individual unconventionality of expression if nothing else.

The genesis of Crows' Bones lies in a commission from the enterprising Opera North company, who eagerly espoused Martin's idea of presenting a sequence of songs on the theme of ghosts, one which would be virtually guaranteed to involve listeners, on whom the topic invariably exerts a morbid fascination, but also not least because of its deep connectivity with ancestral memory. Martin's partners in this collaboration are singers Becky Unthank and Inge Thomson and nyckelharpa player Niklas Roswall; the special acoustic qualities of their contributions - and Martin's own experimentation effects - are keenly utilised to enhance the storytelling and atmospheric elements, while also imparting the whole project with a deep-rooted spaciousness and a compellingly immediate sense of theatre. The very special sound-world of Crows' Bones is generated in part by the old-worldly resonances of the nyckelharpa and in part by the singers intoning through tin cans attached to gramophone horns, while the revelatory studio techniques of producer Adrian Utley (Portishead) prove just what Martin demands to realise his vision of the central concept. The act of stepping over the crows' bones is, in effect, seen as a rite of passage into the spirit world outside the living, a world to which the singers act almost as guides with their narrations.

Both singers are unerringly well chosen for the ethereal, otherworldly, unsettling timbres of their voices, and the impact of their interpretations of the various texts is seriously spellbinding. These draw from a wide range of original sources, which encompass well-known pieces from folk culture (Lyke Wake Dirge and the classic Child ballad Three Ravens), a setting of a Kris Drever poem (Mess Of Crows), Tom Campbell's telling adaptation of a John Manifold poem (Griesly Bride), and a pair of brilliantly evocative contemporary compositions (the tremendous One December Morn, from the pen of The Young 'Uns' Sean Cooney, and Conor O'Brien's chilling I Saw The Dead). The disc also contains a small number of shorter improvisatory pieces with a kind of musical toyshop feel, some featuring exotic instruments such as the khomus (Yakutian mouth harp) and "The Log" (a cello string on a log, no less!); these pieces punctuate the songs themselves and set them into relief while also forming a creative binding that entirely satisfies within context and sequence.

I'd recommend that you keep your mind open and receptive to this outstanding and inspirational record, which contains music of an intensely haunting and genuinely stimulating nature.

David Kidman