Sergeant, open the iris

So, yes, I am in fact writing these out of order, but writing the last one made me think about this album and as it was also gig related I thought it was a natural companion piece to follow up with. So this album choice was a result of two different gigs. As noted previously I went to see the Scottish Ensemble and Anna Meredith doing their collaborative album Anno at the Barbican at the end of September, and then at the end of October I went to see the Scottish Ensemble here in the Inverness again. To my intense amusement, working with Anna Meredith again had clearly reminded the ensemble how much they enjoy playing her work, because the whole second half of the Inverness gig was pieces by Anna Meredith re-arranged for string ensemble. Mostly from her first electronic album Varmints - the lead violin noted with clear irony before they played Nautilus that that piece had been intended as a clear break from her previous orchestral work - and having experienced it as something akin to a transcendental experience - I virtually floated home afterwards - obviously I had to go and actually listen to the album in question.

I didn’t initially love this album, despite it being much more what I was expecting from Anna Meredith - before I encountered Anno I knew her mostly from her film scoring work - but as I’ve continued to listen to it across the last month, I’ve come to the conclusion that I like it more the further away from the gig I get. For example, I can now listen to Blackfriars and feel it’s glorious rhythms combine happily with my memories of my recent holiday in London, of standing outside Blackfriars station at rush hour, hearing bells and clocks striking all over the place, feeling the ebb and flow of traffic around me and the rumble of the tube below - I have a whole bunch of field recordings I made in and around that tube station - and think, yes, that part of London does indeed feel like that. I also feel like I’ve been able to fall in love with Nautilus and Scrimshaw all over again in their own right, without constantly comparing them negatively with their reimagined versions. (Honestly I want to hear Nautilus re-arranged for brass a la that Hannah Peel album I wrote about earlier this year.) I do think I need to go see Anna Meredith live in her own right next time she’s touring, because I think her work really lends itself to live performance, to variations on a theme and interacting with visuals and graphics, a proper multimedia experience. However, now that I’ve got enough distance from the gig, I can happily also enjoy it, lying on the sofa with low winter light and just the fairy lights on, through big headphones and let it transport me to other places.

Sometime this summer, I rediscovered my fic writing muse. Which has been great, but has unfortunately also meant that I’ve fallen quite behind on writing up my monthly albums - I have several months of backlog! Fortunately, I have still actually been listening to the albums and noting them down, so I’ve been able to look back at my list and write them up.

First up, we’re all the way back to the summer, for my August album, which was Fable by Ainsley Hamil. (I really thought I’d at least started this post, I definitely remember sitting down in the days after the gig with the album on and the intent to write about it. I suspect I probably started writing it into the ‘create entries’ page and lost the draft.) I mostly know Ainsley Hamil as a Gaelic singer - competed for the Gold Medal at the Mod a couple of time - and this album is split pretty evenly between songs in Gaelic and English, with a Burns number thrown in for good measure. Personally I think if we’re talking traditional Gaelic modes, she’s better suited to puirt-a-beul than the strictures of the Gold Medal - I’ve seen her do puirt live and she’s very good, it’s not easy to keep up that level of articulation at that speed especially not in the middle of a gig! She has such a rich, warm singing voice, it’s a pleasure to listen to her sing, and always so tempting when the album finishes, to just stick it on again for another play through!

Unusually, I was listening to this album extensively because I was going to a gig, rather than going to the gig because I’d been listening to the album a lot. My local art centre hosts a folk music festival in a tent on it’s lawn every summer. (Not in one intense weekend but two bands per session, two sessions a night, five nights a week across two months.) Living near by and being a regular gig go-er, I go to a lot of these sessions, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, sometimes pre-planned, others spur of the moment because I walked past and thought ‘oh they’re good’ and stayed. The Ainsley Hamil gig was planned fairly far in advance, as a friend texted me just after the programme came out and asked if I fancied it, and as I did and it was a day I was on a helpful shift, we booked it and went. As it was her idea, and I’d agreed on the basis that I remembered what I’d heard of Hamil’s latest album being good, I thought I better swat up beforehand.

(It’s a lovely album, but gosh, live really is her forte, she was such a compelling and warm presence on stage, making her music come alive. In both Gaelic and Scots, her delivery on the album is more precise and probably more technically correct, but live she was so much more natural and felt much less constrained.)