Debbie Armour’s Burd Ellen bring a modernist edge and samurai-like minimalism to interpretations of traditional folk songs on their debut album

Folk music can, in the right hands, be as forward-thinking as the finest hip-hop, re-using its own past to lay pathways beyond the present. Silver Came, the debut album by Burd Ellen, rescues traditional folk songs from the peddlers of ersatz authenticity and is freer and more thrillingly authentic as a result. The new solo project of Debbie Armour (Alasdair Roberts, Green Ribbons, Alex Rex), with Gayle Brogan and Lucy Duncan in tow, Burd Ellen pull at the cords of tradition, unravelling prevailing narratives and re-forging them in steel.

“Tha Thìde Agam `Eiridh” feels like it is being transmitted from across the unreachable sea at the impossible edge of the world. A lone voice rings out from the deck of a long-abandoned ship, albatrosses falling from the sky like the first drops of Glasgow rain. Maintaining the sparseness, yet introducing the other voices of the group, “Because My Love Loves Me” is in some ways even more beautifully isolating. The looming presence of the man (my love) in the narrative is dissected and carefully dissipated; a terminal patient flatlining after experimental surgery. Eschewing instrumentation, the opening three tracks constitute a block of prepared minimalism, the sonic equivalent of Ingmar Bergman’s immaculate Winter Light.

A fluctuating organic drone underpins “Sweet Lemany”, which is as visceral as the deepest techno. Burd Ellen proceed to strip away the surface, briefly revealing the inner lives of ghosts. “Fair Annie of Lochroyan” builds upon the drone-work, performing an archaeology on the distant past that makes it come alive in the present, a glimpsing-into rather than constant flow. The drones form a tether to the past, a temporary connection that is in danger of snapping back and pulling the protagonists into a history not their own. But it’s precisely this danger – their risk-taking – that produces such breath-stopping results. Burd Ellen have somehow hijacked the time travel apparatus from Chris Marker’s La Jetée and re-appropriated it for their own means. If it begins by watching one’s own death, then it must end that way too.

Silver Came keeps revealing new beginnings, expanding its territory. The second to last “Awake Awake” takes an intoxicating turn, introducing piano work that recalls Sophie Hutchings and feels akin to Max Richter essaying Nora Durst on The Leftovers. It’s folk music reconfigured as post-minimalist composition or avant-garde pop, a dream allowed momentary substance.

burdellen.bandcamp.com

Stewart Gardiner
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