"Easing A Busy Mind" Erland Cooper's Return To Orkney
Composer reflects on his roots, the author George Mackay Brown, and his mysterious new album...
“A tall iron beacon, wanly winking, stands in the tide-race. The St Ola turns into Stromness harbour. The engines shut off. The boat glides towards the pier, the gulls, the waiting faces.”
*George Mackay Brown’s* description of arriving into Orkney by boat is as humble yet vibrant as the revered Scottish poet was himself.
Visiting in person will always be the best way to understand and appreciate this remote, idiosyncratic archipelago. But if you can’t do that, then Mackay Brown’s flowing, precise descriptions of his home isles and their people will take you pretty close.
The same might be said for the music of composer and multi-instrumentalist *Erland Cooper*, who grew up in Stromness, a few doors down from the revered poet, and has long taken him as an influence.
“I always joke that I had a chance to learn from a living legend, get some pearls of wisdom, and instead me and my brothers would throw stones or knock on his door and run away,” says Cooper, “And actually, I don't think he'd want it any other way.”
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After a near-decade of playing in experimental bands – first Erland & The Carnival, then The Magnetic North along with Simon Tong and Hannah Peel – Cooper turned his focus to solo work in 2018, with a three-part run of albums about the air, sea, and land of Orkney.
The first, titled ‘Solan Goose’, took the islands’ birdlife for inspiration – an enduring passion of Cooper’s, and a true fixture of the archipelago, where the RSPB’s expansive reserves make it one of the biggest landowners in the region – while the second, ‘Sule Skerry’, borrowed its title from the world’s most remote manned lighthouse and gazed out to sea. Last spring, the trilogy wrapped up with an album about Orkney’s lands, ‘Hether Blether’, before the final instalment of a concurrent series of ambient ‘companion’ albums that has followed ‘Solan Goose’, ‘Sule Skerry’, and ‘Hether Blether’ arrived in the autumn.
The run of records mirrored Mackay Brown’s 1969 book An Orkney Tapestry in its attempt to capture the spirit of Orkney in a way that goes beyond the language of guide books or newspapers.
But despite the scale of ambition in this three-year, three-album project (if you count the companion pieces, it’s more like six albums), Cooper’s solo work had always been, as he puts it, “written, produced, created in the cracks of everything else I'm doing.”
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The three-year project began as a way of “easing a busy mind” and transporting himself away from the compact rush of the UK capital. Now, Cooper is seeking a new way to break from his own self-imposed cycle of writing and releasing.
His newest work won’t be heard until 2024. Titled ‘Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence’, the record comprises three movements written for solo violin and string ensemble and was recorded at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (or RCS) in Glasgow, with Daniel Pioro assuming the lead violin role. As with almost everything Cooper does, there’s a nod to Mackay Brown: it was recorded to mark the 100th anniversary mark of the late poet’s birth, and borrows its title from the final lines of his poem A Work For Poets. The same words are also inscribed on Mackay Brown’s pink sandstone headstone in Warbeth Cemetery, which lies a short distance from the cobbled paving of Stromness.
The only surviving recording of ‘Carve The Runes Then Be Content With Silence’ exists on a ¼-inch magnetic tape which, as of June this year, has been buried somewhere on Orkney. All digital copies have been deleted. The tape reel will be dug up in three years’ time, or sooner if someone stumbles upon it, and mark the final record in a three-album deal that Cooper has signed with Universal’s Mercury KX imprint (which is focused on modern classical, electronic, and avant-garde music, and includes the likes of Olafur Arnalds and Anoushka Shankar on its roster).
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As the tape burial stunt suggests, Cooper isn’t shy of embracing a gimmick or a bit of theatricality here and there. It’s not hard to picture the composer’s wry smile seeing record stores list the release date as ‘2024, or whenever it gets dug up.’
He ‘signed’ his new record deal in the sand of the Bay Of Skaill, a grey stretch of beach sitting under the gaze of the excavated Neolithic settlement at Skara Brae – digging a runic ‘E’ rather than scratching out his signature in a corner office (though, presumably, that will have happened at some point too).
This sense of playful performance has been a fairly consistent element of Cooper’s career – recent flourishes include crowd-sourcing feathers for his string section to use in place of bows for live performances – but now seems to be coming more and more to the fore. He’s momentarily stumped by the question of why this might be the case, before offering up something of an explanation: “I don't know where that's come from. I think it's coming from a confidence of collaboration with people that I trust, and people that trust me.”
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But while Cooper understands the symbolic or narrative appeal of these performative, sometimes eccentric gestures, they’re rarely superficial. They’re almost always sparked by or feeding his own curiosity about something in the modern world (though he admits “doing a big fuck-off rune in the sand” was purely fun). - In this case, the act of encasing the tape in soil has become a meditation on value; what at first looks like a gimmick slowly unfolds and takes on its own gravity the more Cooper explains it.
“It’s about having something precious,” he says. “We’re in a world of hyper connectivity, instant gratification, when you can have something immediately,” he snaps his fingers, “when new music can stream next Friday, and an algorithm pushes it at you whether you're going to listen or not. I want to kind of reset the balance of the value in the arts, which, to be frank, over the last year has been hammered, along with many other industries.” You can’t fault his ambition.
Just as Mackay Brown complained in 1969 that newspapers (including, presumably, the ones he wrote for) “erode the language with their daily poundings” and that “we are in danger of contenting ourselves with husks,” Cooper feels acutely aware of the risk posed by constant consumption and the instantaneous nature of our access to music.
In this sense, the burial is not just a physical or chemical curiosity of what happens when you submerge a tape in soil for three years, it also poses a question about what happens to the value of the music itself while it sits interred.
“When I said to all the musicians playing in Glasgow that I was going to mix the record, put it onto tape to create one sole copy, and delete all the digital files, their faces just dropped, both mortified and excited,” Cooper says. “Even though I'd said this at the start as a manifesto, we got to the end of the recording and they said ‘are you actually going to do this?’ I said, ‘Yes,’ and they said, ‘But it sounds so good.’ I said, ‘Exactly. But didn't we just have the best experience that we’ll all remember?’ and one of the players replied, ‘I don't think I'll ever forget it.’” For now, those players’ memories are the only place the sounds can be heard. Cooper says he’s been singing lines in the shower, but even these recreations will inevitably begin to disintegrate, their sound and structure warped by the passage of time and limitations of memory.
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Copies of the score for ‘Carve The Runes’ have been entrusted with BBC broadcaster Elizabeth Alker, author Ian Rankin, and Paul Weller, as a kind of insurance policy – “If the tape comes out completely silent, people will say ‘how do we know you didn’t just plant a copy of Abba’s ‘Greatest Hits’?’” says Cooper.
The sheets include idiosyncratic playing instructions. “Like the sustained sound of a ferry horn, bouncing and bending in the harbour," reads one, "like walking through heather and peat moorland," goes another, “like the wow and flutter of unearthed magnetic tape.” Cooper drops hints that the score might contain clues to the tape’s burial location too, describing it as a sort of treasure map (he plans to release actual maps and further clues over the course of the year).
The burial process (Cooper insists it’s not a burial, but a “planting” – and all the expectant growth that comes with it) is something Cooper has explored before, leaving tapes in the soil for a few months at a time. He describes his writing process: “25% is this magic, these melodies that just come to you, but 75% is editing: writing, changing, deleting, asking ‘what can I take away?’” Planting his tapes in the ground is a way of inviting dirt, damp, and darkness into that process. And, for Cooper, it makes absolute sense in the wider context of his work. “I write about place, people and community, landscape,” he says, “This is the ultimate collaboration: I'm collaborating with the soil. So it's a three-stage process: to compose, decompose, and then recompose.”
Cooper has done a rough calculation, he says, to extrapolate what might be left of the ‘Carve The Runes’ tape when he digs it up three years from now. The final stage – “recomposition” – will see him rescoring the work, remaining as close and faithful to what the tape sounds like after it’s been drawn up from the earth. If it’s 32 minutes of silence, followed by 60 seconds of hiss, then that is what he’ll write down and, he insists, what the ensemble will play when he hires out the Barbican to perform the work for the first time (not that he isn’t hoping for a little more than that to survive the soil).
But, of course, there’s also the chance that an especially dedicated and sleuthy fan might uncover the album before then. If they do, they’ll find a rune stone, and hear the crack of a cheap, mass-produced violin as they drive the spade through the dirt, then a tinny thud as the tool encounters a shortbread biscuit box full of trinkets – seaweed, stones, a postcard, and a letter from Cooper; a time capsule or sorts – before exhuming the tape reel itself.
“All I ask,” says Cooper, imagining the event, “is that if someone does find it, they bring it back to me so we can play and listen to it – together.”
Following *concerns from archaeologists*, Cooper and Mercury KX would like to reiterate that fans searching for the tape should only dig if they come across the rune stone – which is engraved on side with a distinctive urn, and on the other with a feather.
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Words: *Will Pritchard* // *@wf_pritchard*
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