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Buy Glen Lyon Song Cycle by Martyn Bennett
Despite his struggles with ill-health, multi-instrumentalist Martyn Bennett continues to be in the vanguard of those mixing traditional music and technology.This, his fourth album, features a cycle of Gaelic songs sung by his mother Margaret, and the family connection is extended with sampled field-recordings of his grandmother and great-great grandfather. Bennett has framed and interleaved mum's bright, delicate yet wiry vocals with restrained touches of fiddle, pipes, guitar, bass and percussion, as well as a wealth of found sounds -- birds, bees, a ticking clock and a fishing-boat's bilge-pump -- digitally transformed into loops and rich background textures. Other samples include the sound of a 1920s threshing machine, woven into the reaping song Buain A' Choirce, Bosnian artillery fire in the bitter lament A Theˆrlaich ñig, and wild Native American chants and drumming on the 19th-century Canadian composition Oran Nam Mogaisean.Profound in conception and assured in execution, Glen Lyon is a bold, brilliant and often deeply moving synthesis of modern studio capabilities and the ageless potency of ancient songs, catalysed by one of the most fertile musical minds in the business. Sue Wilson - Sunday Herald
Media Reviews
multi-instrumentalist Martyn Bennett continues to be in the vanguard of those mixing traditional music and technology...
Despite his struggles with ill-health, multi-instrumentalist Martyn Bennett continues to be in the vanguard of those mixing traditional music and technology.This, his fourth album, features a cycle of Gaelic songs sung by his mother Margaret, and the family connection is extended with sampled field-recordings of his grandmother and great-great grandfather. Bennett has framed and interleaved mum's bright, delicate yet wiry vocals with restrained touches of fiddle, pipes, guitar, bass and percussion, as well as a wealth of found sounds -- birds, bees, a ticking clock and a fishing-boat's bilge-pump -- digitally transformed into loops and rich background textures. Other samples include the sound of a 1920s threshing machine, woven into the reaping song Buain A' Choirce, Bosnian artillery fire in the bitter lament A Theˆrlaich ñig, and wild Native American chants and drumming on the 19th-century Canadian composition Oran Nam Mogaisean.Profound in conception and assured in execution, Glen Lyon is a bold, brilliant and often deeply moving synthesis of modern studio capabilities and the ageless potency of ancient songs, catalysed by one of the most fertile musical minds in the business. Sue Wilson - Sunday Herald
This beautifully constructed fifteen-track song cycle rooted in Skye's Gaelic heritage finds Martyn Bennett capturing not just the traditional music of his surroundings but also its atmosphere and essence...
This beautifully constructed fifteen-track song cycle rooted in Skye's Gaelic heritage finds Martyn Bennett capturing not just the traditional music of his surroundings but also its atmosphere and essence. Where his previous album Hardlands used samples and dance beats to set an uncompromising pace, Martyn weaves his mother Margaret's wonderful singing into a tapestry made from the natural atmosphere of Skye.
Sampled sickles and tapes of threshing machines and fish barrels build rhythm tracks; recordings of wind, clocks, machinery and even at one point a bee give this album a pastoral quality, an almost outdoor feel - there are moments where you can imagine yourself climbing a hill to find Martyn and Margaret sitting on a rug and singing like this. Glen Lyon is refreshing, unexpected, understated and poetic - more of an experience than an album. The production is wonderfully restrained and all the better for that; the collection of songs an unhurried journey through the island's musical emotions, from happy to sad to reflective and back again.
It's a beautiful listen - laments dissolve into wistful songs of unrequited love; a violin gently reinforces Margaret's melody on Will You Return My Love and MacCrimmon's Lament, whistles and pipes bubble happily underneath In Praise of Brothers; minimal bass punctuates a rhythm played on fish barrels on Walking Song. And then there are the 'big' tracks like the opener Reaping Song and the startling Indian Moccasin Song - a modern interpretation of an 1820s migrant farmer's song, complete with stomping rhythm, fuzz bass and Native American singing - unexpected but great.
Martyn set out to make a tone poem, but Glen Lyon is more than just a gathering together of songs. It's a beautiful collection of moods and textures, an ambient journey re-interpreting and in the process re-invigorating the Bennett family's musical tradition … and it's the record of the year so far for me.
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