Grey Malkin :: Our Eyes Are Filled With Moss
Experimental folk, woodwinds, electronics and ritual body horror.
Somewhere in Our Eyes Are Filled With Moss, anatomy stops behaving like anatomy.
“We are linked by blood / And blood is memory”, a voice sings in “Our Limbs Are Made Of Sticks”. Soon after come bandages for a wounded world. Elsewhere eyes contain graves, mouths contain cradles, bones are mud. Grey Malkin piles up images until the body becomes almost uninhabitable. Too much earth inside.
The record begins with “Our Mouths Are Filled With Leaves”, a minute and a half that already seems to know what will happen later. Alison O’Donnell sings over shruti; the words run through limbs, mouths, bones, eyes, entrails. It feels like the metamorphosis of an inventory drawn up after the person has already gone and somebody has to decide where to put what remains.
“From The Threshold”. Six minutes. Burnt Paw’s voice is a procession moving through burned maps, signs badly sought, scarecrows and points of passage. The text could easily turn into occult theatre. Malkin makes it less decorative through duration: repetitions, sound matter thickening, parts that seem to have forgotten why they came in. By the end, the boundary invoked by the title has become mostly an uncomfortable place to stand.
Grey Malkin has worked like this for a long time. Since the days of The Hare and the Moon he has preferred to build songs without much respect for folk purity. That old indiscipline is still useful here. “Our Limbs Are Made Of Sticks” receives Alan Davidson’s woodwinds but still feels assembled from pieces that might once have belonged to other objects. The voice governs only itself, as present as everything else.
Then the stars begin to go out.
“One By One, The Stars Are Slowly Going Out” lasts a little over three minutes and has a simplicity that almost bothers you, arriving after so much terrestrial matter where the music has raised itself low and abstract. The title already carries the whole action. No need to add astronomy. One light after another, that is enough, and the strings do it.
“Ripe With Blood & Barley” is shorter still and much less innocent. Alison O’Donnell returns for a small Beltane rhyme in which men and harvest end up in the same agricultural cycle. Blood, barley, compost. Just over a minute. Malkin knows a thing can become ridiculous if you stare at it for too long, so he lets it pass before it has time to strike a pose.
The real centre may be “Grant Me A Silver Ending”. David Colohan sings while clocks slow down, then fall; a thousand blackbirds head towards London. It is one of the strangest images on the record precisely because London remains London. No lost village, no hill outside the calendar. The birds are going to the city. Even the end of the world has to head somewhere.
“Burial Song” leaves two minutes almost without explanation before “Our Eyes They Spill With Silver” returns to the body and damages it again. Speculum Bunny sings, Davidson brings the woodwinds. This time mouth and eyes no longer contain leaves and moss: blood, silver, cradles, graves. The opening formulas have come back wrong.
The record remembers its own words well enough to corrupt them.
“Our Horns Are Made Of Stone” almost completes the circle. But “Bone Mother”, ten minutes long, prevents any orderly ending. Amanda Votta and Davidson’s woodwinds enter the longest piece on the record; winter arrives, frost is called as though singing might actually bring it closer. After half an hour spent mixing anatomy with ground, the season feels less like background than a force capable of finishing the job.
“Our Mouths Are Filled With Leaves”
Shruti, Alison O’Donnell’s voice and the first inventory of a body already beginning to turn into something else.
“Grant Me A Silver Ending”
David Colohan, falling clocks and blackbirds heading towards London: the album at its most melodic and strangely specific.
“Bone Mother”
Ten minutes in which woodwinds, voice and winter gradually turn atmosphere into physical pressure.
What remains is “All The World Is But A Faint Ghost”, one minute and forty-five seconds. No need for another conclusion.
Our Eyes Are Filled With Moss belongs to folk only for as long as “folk” can contain a certain amount of earth under the fingernails, unsteady electronics, woodwinds, foreign voices and dead things that still have a use. Grey Malkin takes images that elsewhere have become furniture — Beltane, horns, stones, processions, ghosts — and gives them back a small inconvenience: here they make a mess.
In the end the eyes are full of moss because perhaps they had been left open too long.
