Overheard

Birdsong features on a range of recent folk-inflected albums – our avian friends are the exotic new back-ups (although solo spots are welcome, especially for the endangered) and birdsong opens violinist Ruby Colley’s Overheard, a new set mixing folk, the legacy of JS Bach (one of Colley’s musical heroes), contemporary classical, baroque and improvisation – all strings to her bow over a 20-year career as a sound artist, composer and player.

Climate and conservation are themes, subsumed under the domestic rhythms of family life, here captured in lockdown, and she uses field recordings from her immediate locale on which to build music and space, employing violin, oud, double bass and electronics to evoke spirits of place and being, of nature cycles and life cycles. The music is beautiful and memorable, and repays repeated listens. The seven pieces open with those birds on ‘Springs Eternal’, before the pizzicato opening and fluid playing of ‘Here Comes the Rayne’ and the twilit other-worldliness of ‘Sacred Ground’, under which roll throaty rumbles of thunder, while ‘Edgeland’ tilts further into the uncanny. She’s one of a range of superlative instrumental artists in England drawing on folk, classical and more, and Colley’s soundscapes are stand-outs among them all.