KARINE POLWART WITH PIPPA MURPHY - A Pocket Of Wind Resistance
Hudson Records HUD005CD
This is the musical accompaniment to Karine’s theatrical debut, Wind Resistance, premiered at the Edinburgh International Festival in 2016. It was conceptually inspired by her wonder at viewing, from her Midlothian home, the annual migration of pink-footed geese to peat bog Fala Flow and how their symbiotic behaviour (‘shifting skeins’) in resisting the wind (stepping up falling back labouring and resting) and the ecology and avian wildlife of that vicinal moor environment (the first place you ever knew was warm and wild and wet and in that dark womb you grew, we are all bog born) bear comparison with the fragilities and dependencies of human life, and the natural world’s emphatic and elemental need to conceive sanctuaries for survival.
Imaginatively explored over a sequence of 14 pieces through a fluid combination of sung vocals, mouth music, incantatory chant, spoken and whispered word, and the found sound and instrumental contribution of ‘sound designer’ Pippa Murphy, the result is compelling, often hypnotic, in its appeal. Richly poetic in its lyric content, sonically generally sparse and spacious (using melodic and percussive elements to create textured, ambient and atmospheric soundscapes), it animates the Fala courtship between returning soldier, then horseman, Will Sime and his moorland sweetheart Roberta (whose song was a fact like the weather) from summer 1919 and the tragedy of her painful death delivering their daughter Molly (Karine’s former neighbour) interwoven with meditative musings on the natural world along with arrangements of Lark In The Clear Air, Burns’ Tyrannic Man’s Dominion and the poignant old ballad recounting Queen Jane’s death in childbirth.
www.karinepolwart.com
Kevin T. Ward
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