Garefowl: The Open Fund for Music Creators
New Album Development and Recording
Garefowl is a collective of musicians (Ewan Macdonald, Chris Jones, Jess Whelligan, Nathan Bontrager, Richard O’Flynn, and Stuart Graham) who fuse acoustic instruments with electronics to create a transcendent, polyvalent take on traditional music. Centred on the human and natural heritage of the remote Scottish archipelago of St Kilda, Garefowl was conceived as a response to Ewan’s family history: a relation killed the last great auk (or “garefowl”) in the UK there in 1840 in the belief that it was a witch, and the project aims to bring an emotional dimension to the plight of endangered seabirds today.
Garefowl will use their Open Fund for Music Creators grant to compose and record their second album, including time developing music on St Kilda itself. Building on their first album Cliffs, the new album will feature original compositions inspired by the island’s rich seabird life, which is now under threat from climate change and avian flu. In creating the album, Garefowl will explore new ways of working in dialogue with nature to build melodies and textures. By blending found sounds from island objects, tones generated from rock and bone samples via X-ray diffraction and digital signal processing techniques (developed by Richard O’Flynn and Joe Gardner), and new compositions in a traditional style, Garefowl will create an album that echos with the sounds of the islands themselves.