Every now and then I encounter a piece of music that does everything I’d want it to on first hearing but continues to repay repeated listens. ‘I a Moon’ - the third album by North Sea Radio Orchestra, is one of them.
It’s one of those I stumbled over via the now familiar, ‘customers who bought this also bought…’ and “I wonder if it’s on Spotify?” route - a process familiar to most music consumers these days. Without getting into a debate about its beneficial or detrimental effects on working musicians, it certainly brought this little gem to my attention sooner than might have happened otherwise and led me to pay for the physical artefact not long after. At this stage I can honestly say, “why wasn’t I told sooner?”
How to describe the music? Like so much stuff these days it combines several disparate but somehow compatible elements in an attempt to produce something greater than the sum of it’s parts. In this case, it sounds like a small group of classically trained chamber musicians, (led by the husband and wife team of Craig and Sharron Fortnam), who are equally interested in Minimalism, pastoral electronica and the British folk tradition. On several tracks Sharron sings some of the purest, loveliest female vocals I’ve heard in ages, (reminiscent of Kate Bush but without either histrionics or simpering). Apart from the relatively modest and beautifully integrated use of electronics and organ, everything else is acoustic with instrumentation including violin, viola, cello, clarinet, bassoon and sparing percussion. The whole thing is clear as a bell and effectively uncluttered. Instead of trying to prove how clever they are through complexity or deliberate difficulty, these musicians have chosen to demonstrate just how intelligently they can combine a few simple and clearly defined ingredients into a beautifully judged whole.
Any detailed analysis of how this music is constructed, whilst instructive, should be at the service of investigating the intensity of emotional response it elicits. Above all, it’s the sheer Britishness of the thing that is the most affecting. It’s steeped in those qualities of spartan romanticism and nuanced melancholy that are the specialities of these islands but, whilst essentially pastoral in outlook, it avoids being at all cloying or hackneyed. Doubtless there is a powerful nostalgic impulse at work but it’s more like a sincere yearning for a personal past when things just seemed to make more sense, than for an idealised, imagined bucolic golden age.
In essence, this is because the disparate musical strands are more than mere bolt-on stylistic tropes. Instead, they are cleverly integrated into compositional schemes which are unafraid to display their nuts and bolts, (and wooden wedges), within each piece. The eight-minute mini-epic that is ‘Heavy Weather' demonstrates this admirably. The piece combines a vocal duet simultaneously reminiscent of nursery rhyme, folk canon and sea shanty with instrumental passages that recall the pastoralism of Vaughan Williams before erupting into something akin to a village green silver band. Yet the whole thing hangs on the clear framework of a simple piano figure that introduces and repeats throughout the whole piece. As the distinct musical layers subside in the last few bars we are left with an electronic coda that resembles nothing more than Terry Riley idly noodling a repeated phrase of organ Minimalism. It’s a clear nod to the album's structural, avant-garde underpinnings.
The following ‘Berliner Luft’ pushes this compositional angularity further to the fore. Complete with its Modernism-invoking German title it sets off at a trot, employing endlessly repeating angular patterns of strings, woodwinds and electronics. Yet, lying in wait at the heart of the piece are layers of violin that seem destined to soar above the Malvern Hills on a summer’s day. The piece could easily soundtrack a documentary film about a country postman on his rounds.
Mention must also be made of ‘The Earth Beneath Our Feet’ a track so insanely yet modestly beautiful that it has me on the verge of tears each time I hear it. Over a simple accompaniment of guitar and strings Sharron sings,
“And so, when you come around
we’ll open all the windows
let the evening out,
we’ll be sitting in a row
looking over England
watch the evening go".
Now, who doesn’t want a memory like that?
Finally, is it just me - or are the name of the ensemble and the C.D. package not just perfect signifiers of all of that? There’s just the right degree of allusion in the name to the shipping forecast, public service broadcasting and to the bleaker stretches of British coastline – of trawlers out at night in rough seas searching for the B.B.C. frequencies. Furthermore, I swear that artwork just comes straight off the forgotten box lid of some quaintly futuristic game from my childhood.
It hardly amounts to a critical approach but I’ve played ‘I a Moon’ relentlessly over the last few weeks and I just can’t find anything I don’t like.
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