Working title: bior-shruth old bed of a river’s former course Gaelic

pronounced as beer-shrooh 

Bior‑shruth (working title) is an album that weaves a river’s relentless flow with the layered, migrating memories of my Gaelic‑speaking great‑grandparents, tracing the ways that language, land and lineage move, fade and resurface across six generations.  

When I stumbled across the term bior-shruth in Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks, it immediately drew together what I wanted this next album to explore- rivers + tape, flow + velocity, memory + record. 

I climb into the flowing river and think of the tape moving on my reel-to-reel machine, a set rate that ebbs and flows to its own rhythm and disturbances, over rocks or machine heads, around curves, corners & magnets. Open a reel of tape and let it fall, and it’s like water pouring from a tipped vessel; the idea of memory- recorded on tape as artefact or held in the molecules of moving water - documenting a journey.

I cut lengths of tape to create loops, then cover the erase head on my reel-to-reel machine so I can layer sound-on-sound. I make a layered bed of sound building a mixture of field recordings, analogue synths, piano and voice. Through this process I keep homing back to my local river and its ecosystem, dwelling in the layers of silt, sand and mud, the tree roots and mycelium giving way to birds, trees, bats and fish. 

In the autumn I went on a bat walk with local ecologist Ivi Szaboova where we used detectors to listen to bat echolocation at dusk. On first hearing their rapid percussive rhythm, pitched down to an audible frequency for the human ear by the detectors, I knew I wanted to make music with these extraordinary sounds. The more I learned about bats, the more they fascinated me - their relationship to water and its importance to them for foraging and navigation, and their relationships to one another, the way grandmothers are teachers of the young, the way mothers carry their unborn bats until they’re almost a third of their bodyweight, the more I felt the pull in understanding my own story through these, less-told-of, mammals. 

When I heard that bats travel to maternity roosts from where I live in Stroud to where my great-grandmother came from, across the Severn river in the Forest of Dean, I couldn’t resist linking bat migration to my family. My imagination travelled across the wide expanse of the estuary to follow my great-grandmother from the Forest of Dean to Kenya, and to my  great-great grandmother’s migration from Skye to Punjab . The river and its ecosystem began gently disrupting a pattern. A pattern in the way our family stories around migration had been told, for the most part, centered on patriarchal jobs, war and colonialism. And whilst this story exists, it’s not the whole story. I became fascinated by the stories  of the women in our family, the great grandmothers I never met and the extraordinary things that happened to them on their journeys over water. Quickly the soundbeds I was creating on tape from the field recordings of the river, led to songs emerging on the album about these women- Isabella, Dorothy, Meg, my Mum Fi, myself and my daughter Joy, spanning six generations.

There’s a line in the book A Land by Jaquetta Hawkes where she describes Henry Moore finding the form within the stone. I gather sound and listen for forms, making shapes  that seek to tell a shared story.