The rain lashes down, the wind whistles and a skein of pink-footed geese fly overhead, honking in the twilight, as Erland Cooper’s concert begins. Cley Marshes nature reserve on the Norfolk coast is an unusual place for a gig, but the perfect stage for an evening of music inspired by the birds of Orkney.
Cooper, known for the folk-rock of Erland and the Carnival and the more experimental soundscapes of the Magnetic North, migrated to new terrain for his debut solo album Solan Goose, released last year. With its combination of contemporary classical, ambient and electronica, it drew comparisons to Sigur Rós, Ólafur Arnalds and other music of northerly latitudes, as well as radio play and winning admirers in unexpected places, from literary figures including John Burnside and Robert Macfarlane.
“We were a wee bit stressed,” says Cooper to his audience in Cley, after a four-hour drive to the coast, “and all of a sudden the geese flew over and it reminded us why we make music. We want to take you to the Orkney islands, very slowly, very gently.” For all the gentleness, Cooper’s songs are deeply emotional and given lift by three classically trained multi-instrumentalists, particularly the wordless notes delivered by the soaring soprano of Lottie Greenhow.
“If it moves me close to the point of tears, I’ve probably achieved what I wanted,” says Cooper when we meet the following week on London’s South Bank, where he’s rehearsing for an appearance with a rather different collaborator, Paul Weller.
The “release” that Cooper finds in his spare electronic and classic “ecosystem of music” is matched by the release he finds in natural landscapes: “You can feel like you’re going to sob and you don’t quite know why.”
He has created the music for Nest, a light and sound installation in Waltham Forest’s Lloyd Park which this weekend will mark the opening of the first ever London borough of culture. Cooper’s compositions sample the voices of 1,076 people from local school, community and gospel choirs. One listener praised his samples of birdsong; Cooper was delighted – they were children impersonating a starling murmuration. “They pretended to be starlings, singing at random times which is exactly what you want, and very quickly they came together, and sang together, which is scary like Hitchcock,” he laughs.
Solan Goose was hatched almost by accident. Cooper, born and raised on the archipelago of Orkney, was feeling increasingly stressed and claustrophobic in London. He’d arrive at his studio and turn a noise he had heard – a jackhammer perhaps – into a note, “create a drone out of it” and then improvise a piano over that. He named each recording after Orcadian dialect for island birds: solan goose (gannet), shalder (oystercatcher), tammie norie (puffin) and, most deliciously, cattie-face (short-eared owl). “It was a way to pull me home, pull me back to childhood memory. Before I knew it, I had this fully fledged thing,” he says.
It wasn’t all quite that simple. In keeping with his commitment to Orkney traditions, Cooper tried putting traditional folk lyrics to his music. It didn’t work. “Imagine being on a South Ronaldsay beach and all of a sudden there’s this red balloon popping up in the middle, and you’re no longer looking at the landscape. It was so out of place, it had to go.”
In fact, Cooper has found it a relief not to sing during a year of performing the album – beginning at the Walthamstow Wetlands nature reserve, in London, and taking in summer festivals that included Womad and Port Eliot. “I fell out of joy with my own voice,” he says. “It’s a habitual experience when you doubt whether you can sing in the first place.” Instead, he has embraced playing with classically trained musicians.
“The classical world can be very intimidating for some, but I remind myself that music is just sounds, just patterns,” he says. “I’m always trying to write the simplest thing, trying to do more with fewer notes.”
Cooper has completed the second of a trilogy of albums shaped by Orkney’s air, sea and land, as celebrated by Orkney poet George Mackay Brown. Solan Goose is the air; the sea is next; the record will be released in the spring.
He returned to Orkney for inspiration, making recordings – sonic postcards – of the reverberations everywhere from beneath the pier to the inside of one of Orkney’s Neolithic chamber tombs. But he made the album in London, which provides a kind of critical distance. “I like to take it [Orkney’s landscape] away in my wee books and boxes and digital and analogue machines. When you listen to something out of context, that’s when you know what to keep and what to discard.”
He couldn’t wait to escape the island as a teenager. “Now all I want to do is tell people about Orkney and go back and take people with me,” he says. “Nature and Orkney in particular is the one true reset for me. There’s something about the longitude and latitude, the air is different, the light is different. Over this nine-year period I’ve been making music in various guises, it’s the one true thing I constantly go back to.” He pauses and smiles. “I should work for the tourist board.”
Nest, a light and sound installation, is in the grounds of the William Morris Gallery, London, 11-13 January. Erland Cooper is at Trades Club, Hebden Bridge, on 30 March and Milton Court, London, on 16 May. Solan Goose is out now on Phases Records.
This article was corrected on 9 January 2019. A photograph by Alex Kozobolis was wrongly credited to Emily Dennison
