STEPS TOWARDS SIMMERDIM (AND FACING DOWN THE ROAR…)

I was born and raised in Orkney, an archipelago in the north of Scotland. My English parents settled there some years before I was born and brought up me and my siblings on a smallholding without electricity and most other modern conveniences. We weren’t sent to the local school, and instead got a different kind of education at home - mostly the ‘learning by doing’ type. And there was a lot to do. We spent several hours a day cutting wood, gardening, milking goats, or hunting rabbits. During winter storms, the house would creak like an old ship at sea. Trapped inside, we leaned on our imaginations. My brother and I got our hands on a cassette recorder when he was 10 and I was about eight, and together we wrote some very surreal musical numbers and documented other odd sounds, including the groans of a depressed typewriter. 

One of the interesting things about home education is that children tend to develop their own specialisms. While my sisters threw themselves into playing fiddle and painting, and my brother was usually covered in engine oil, I spent as much time as I could studying animals. My father was a naturalist (several members of my extended family also work in wildlife conservation), and he passed the ‘nature bug’ to me. Orkney is a special place for wildlife, and in spring and summer the islands come alive with the calls of breeding waders (shorebirds). During the simmerdim - the night-long twilight found in the Northern Isles around midsummer - I used to lie in bed listening to the otherworldly nocturnal calls of curlews. Many years later, memories of this experience led to Simmerdim: Curlew Sounds, a multi-artist album project of music and curlew soundscapes that I released in 2022 in partnership with The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

By the age of 13, I’d decided that I wanted to be a wildlife conservationist - or maybe even a wildlife television presenter. To achieve either of these things, I knew that I needed to send myself to the local school. Stromness Academy was and probably still is a decent state school, but my time at school wasn’t easy. I was bullied - partly because of the English accent that I’d inherited from my parents (and which, due to our isolation, hadn’t been ironed out), and probably partly because I was just a bit different. It turns out that “hello, do you like geese?” isn’t a normal conversation starter for most teenagers. For a while I managed to do well academically, but it was a case of peaking too soon. By my final two years, I had lost focus, dyed my hair black, and was again seeking refuge in writing songs. Although I scraped through in the end with a handful of grades, I left school confused - not sure whether to opt for science or music as a career path. 

Eventually I settled on anthropology, because I felt it was a subject I could take in many different directions. Having grown up listening to my father’s affectionate stories of the Inuit who he lived alongside during his time in the Canadian Arctic, and reading books about diverse cultures, I was also deeply attracted to the cultural relativism at the heart of anthropology - the idea that we should seek to understand another person's beliefs and behaviours from the perspective of their culture rather than our own, and through that process learn something about ourselves. After getting to grips with the basics, I came across the work of a ‘rebel anthropologist’, Gregory Bateson, who seemed to write deliberately in riddles, but whose vision of an interconnected world is in some ways beautifully simple. I became consumed with his ideas, not only because I recognised myself in him (his father was a biologist and Gregory turned to anthropology because it was a ‘compromise’ between art and science), but because his ecological outlook on nature and culture gave meaning to my own path, unifying pieces that I couldn’t previously connect. For Bateson (1904 - 1980), everything was about interconnectivity and relations between parts; “the pattern that connects”. In his collection of essays Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), he even goes so far as to attribute a kind of divinity to this web of interconnections (there are some similarities between his pantheistic vision and the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock). Bateson’s reverence for beauty, symmetry, and interconnectivity resonated with the wonder I felt as a child when staring into the miniature underwater worlds of streams, or at leaf veins - but it was also unapologetically about recognising the bridges between science and art. This ecological thinking, combined with anthropological relativism, provided me with the core values that I have carried forward into a lot of my work, both as a musician and a creative producer. 

Nature remains my biggest inspiration. I feel that this would have been the case for me regardless of the century I was born into, but as things are I feel obliged not only to be inspired by nature but also to somehow harness that inspiration to help protect it. With Simmerdim: Curlew Sounds, I wanted to explore the idea that when we lose a species, we also cut off paths to imagination, and wonder. In UK and Irish folklore, curlews have often been seen as a bird of ‘bad omen’. Their distinctive sound - a rising, haunting call that echoes the eeriness of estuaries or moors - has no doubt contributed to associations with the otherworld. One well-known example is the legend of the ‘Seven Whistlers’, which dates to at least the 16th century. People would hear flocks of birds - commonly said to be curlews - calling as they flew at night and ascribe these ‘wailings’ to spirits that foretold a death or calamity. With the album’s title track, I wanted to reflect my own experiences of curlews, whose calls I find indescribably calming. This meant turning the tale of the ‘Seven Whistlers’ on its head, with their song offering a pathway not to danger, but peace and introspection. In the context of their current Red-Listed conservation status, I was also interested from a creative point of view in exploring how folklore like the Seven Whistlers might now be seen as prophetic (of their impending fate, or ours - or both). 

One of the Amazon reviews for Simmerdim - which I found strangely satisfying - complains that “while it has beautiful birdsong on it, [it] also has mechanical roaring”. The roaring in question comes from the combine harvesters that surrounded the tiny, protected refuge where I was recording curlews in Northern Ireland. In large parts of the world, we have squeezed out nature to such an extent that it only clings on in pockets, drowned out by a human sea of industry and noise. I wish I was part of a generation that could pay attention only to the pretty and straight-forwardly beautiful in nature, but it’s too late. We should never stop finding joy in the natural world, but neither should we ignore the fact that we happen to be alive when a greater number of animal and plant species are at risk of extinction than ever before in human history. If the outcome comes at the cost of an occasional negative review, then so be it.


Our responses to this situation cannot, obviously, only be artistic - it’s vital that we also adapt our systems and find new ways of working, and the music industry must be part of this change. In the case of Making Tracks, as well as having an annual nature theme that provides the musicians with creative parameters, I’ve worked hard to develop strategies that minimise our environmental impact and have tangible results. Part of this has involved prioritising slow travel for artists travelling to the residency from mainland Europe, and restricting the number of musicians we select from other continents to a maximum of one per year. These changes have helped bring Making Tracks’ total transport emissions down by around 79% since our first year. For an environmentally focused project that is also built on the conviction that musical encounters have the power to foster greater empathy, tolerance and understanding across social, cultural, and geographical borders, the question of how to reconcile these wide-reaching benefits with environmental responsibility has always loomed large. It’s a question that I have not been able to fully answer, and perhaps it isn’t possible to - but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try (being uncomfortable, after all, can be a particularly powerful source of growth). 

Ultimately, I believe that if we are to start getting ourselves out of the mess we are in, then we need to look for both practical and creative solutions. As Bateson would have said, the human race needs art and poetry just as much as it needs science. More than that, it requires us to understand and reveal the interconnectedness of all things, and face down the roar. 

(A previous version of this article was originally published for Arts & Parts. I’d like to thank Martel Ollerenshaw for encouraging me to write this piece).