Estren

TEYR enjoyed acclaim for their album Far From the Tree in 2016. Then James Patrick Gavin (fiddle and guitar), Dominic Henderson (uilleann pipes and whistles) and Tommie Black-Roff (accordion) wandered offin different directions, musically and geographically – to Nordic countries. In 2018 they got together again, in a log cabin in Finland, sparking ideas which, a couple of years and several trips back to their old stamping ground in West Cornwall later, have come to fruition with Estren.

Cornwall is important to the trio. Their name is the Cornish language word for ‘Three.’ Estren means stranger and the album considers migration, identity and alienation. The title-track begins, ‘I'm a stranger in this country’; there's ‘Gone is the Traveller’, and ‘The Drummer’, the story of a woman in the army, disguising her sex. These themes are expansively explored in soundscapes involving guests from very different fields – South African cellist Abel Selaocoe and electronic drone choir NYX for example. There is a joik here, perhaps, a hint of throat singing there. The pipes and accordion evoke sea voyages, guitar chords stab like rain squalls. ‘La Bestia’ tracks the journey of the notoriously dangerous train that desperate migrants ride across Mexico to the US border, one in four suffering violence on the way. ‘An Tros’ (The Clamour) rises to an appropriate climax.