Erland Cooper — Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence
Qobuz new release review (Sept. 2024)
Although Erland Cooper has composed for the BBC Philharmonic, been commissioned to score the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth, and has recorded more than a dozen releases as a solo artist, bandleader (Erland & the Carnival), and band member (The Magnetic North), each encounter with his music feels like discovering a secret treasure. The deeply personal sonic geography of his two albums with Hannah Peel and Simon Tong as The Magnetic North focused on his home in the remote Orkney Islands — a Scottish archipelago — and may be some of the most impressive and underappreciated works of the 2010s. And the three, interlocked and highly individualistic classical pieces he released between 2018 and 2020 (Solan Goose, Sule Skerry, and Hether Blether — all of which were also accompanied by remarkable, collaborative ambient pieces) are gorgeous, rustic, and naturalistic, functioning like sonic echoes of the more direct Orcadian sounds of the Magnetic North. With this catalog, Cooper has established himself as a daring and talented musician with a very particular thematic focus; what Charles Ives was to New England in the early 20th Century, Cooper may very well be to the Orkneys in the early 21st.
While it shouldn’t be too surprising that Cooper’s major-label debut has roots in the Orkneys, the way those roots are literally manifested might be. Once Cooper completed Carve the Runes, his contract stipulated that the actual master recording tape and the sheet music would be buried in the soil near Cooper’s childhood home on the islands, only to be exhumed three years later after the earth had played its part to “mix and master” the material as it were. All digital copies were destroyed, making it a bit of a high-wire act, but when the tapes were dug up by two fans in late 2022 (an actual treasure hunt!), the music was intact, if definitively impacted (occasional noise, distortion, dropouts) by its burial.
And while that’s certainly an interesting approach to finalizing this material, it would be pointless if the core work wasn’t impressive on its own. The composition itself is written for solo violin and a string ensemble, but is accentuated by the spoken words of Orkney poet George Mackay Brown. While it starts off sounding like any number of gently melodic, lushly minimalist contemporary classical pieces, it doesn’t take long for Cooper to put his stamp on the material. The combination of Brown’s voice — taken from crackly vinyl records — and the circular, propulsive string figures helps unfold the piece into a panoramic vista that feels both warmly intimate and longingly expansive. The entire piece is just over a half-hour long, but each movement offers its own perspective and pleasures, with the first being the most direct and cinematic (it builds to a magnificent crescendo near the end), the second centered around a hauntingly sparse reprieve, and the final bringing the whole piece to a dramatic dissolution. It is a remarkable piece, suffused with organic earthiness, regardless of its time spent underground.
