Composer Erland Cooper did something unexpected with the recordings that would become his new album Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence: he buried them. For several years, in fact, until they were discovered by someone who’d followed the clues Cooper had left to the master tapes’ location. The result is a gorgous, melancholic array of music, interspersed with poetry and given a more textured quality from their time underground. I spoke with Cooper about this unusual process and the role of collaboration in his work.
Did you ever find yourself worrying that the master tape for this work might never be found?
I did not. That would be part of the journey and is outside of my control. If it had been found and hidden in an attic for 20 years, so be it. If a dog had dug it up, so be it. If it was never heard again, so be it. It was all chance based, or aleatoric. I only knew that I would go and exhume it myself, 3 years after planting it. Therefore permitting the natural and human world a chance to collaborate on the finished work.
What effects did you find that being submerged in the earth had on the music?
Without sounding contrived, it sounds earthly, fragile and somehow more poignant to me. The longer the tape plays out to the end of the piece, the more fragile it has become. By the end of the final movement and as we get closer to the middle of the spool, you can hear it breaking up as the consistency of the audio starts to dance across the stereo spectrum – plant life was coming off my tape machine at 15 ips, when I did that first digitisation. A special moment.
What was the inspiration behind that? Was this the first time you’ve let the physical recording be altered by a natural force?
I’d worked with planting tape loops in soil, then submerging them in sea water before drying them out in the hot sun but for a shorter period of time. This was on a record called Landform with Marta Salogni. With ‘Carve The Runes’, this was a sort of extrapolated, longer form experimental version of that with a deeper and more consistent connection people, place and landscape.
How does the land itself factor into your work as a muse? I’m thinking in particular of the way that Music for Growing Flowers came packaged with seeds…
The natural world always plays a part in my work. I read somewhere, nature doesn’t concern itself with meaning, it just is. Well it has been an immense joy to tap into that energy and continue to do so. Forever one of the muses.
When did you first encounter George Mackay Brown’s poetry? And how did you go about selecting passages from his work for this composition?
George lived a few doors up from me, on the same cobbled street in Stromness, Orkney. His work is omnipresent in the air, sea and the land of the islands and seems to hover in the air like a fulmer.
You’ve drawn on poetry before, including a commission around the 100th anniversary of “The Waste Land.” How did this differ from that?
T.S Elliot and his work around London connect neatly through the martyr of St Magnus back to Orkney and George’s viking Inga sagas. I find George’s words more accessible but perhaps that is because we were both shaped by the same landscape so I can recognize myself in his song cycle of word.
How did you end up recording at Stonehenge?
This was a great honor. Orkney has a large stone circle called the Ring of Brodgar and with this connection, much like TS Elliot and George Mackay Brown, pulled like magnets at two ends of the country, I approached the English Heritage to discuss music within their stone circle. I’ve recorded inside Neolithic cairns but this was certainly the oldest world stage I’ll ever perform in. It touches neatly on all the themes of the project and felt rather fitting to be surrounded by these ancient stones in ceremony, while crows left offerings of stick and moss to soloist Freya Goldmark. It is forever carved in my memory now.
Photo: Samuel Davies
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