Orla Wren - The One Two Bird and The Half Horse

Orla Wren is Tui. North East bred, Tui broke away early from the unnecessary trappings of the modern world ( little things, like bank accounts and living in buildings ), becoming that most unlikely ofindividuals ; a be-dreadlocked, lap-top wielding, soundscape creating Neo-Gypsy. His itinerant lifestyle found him busking throughout Europe, sleeping in forests and travelling the length of his adopted Scotland selling his multi media art work on the streets. En route he found time to release the critically acclaimed first Orla Wren album “Butterfly Wings Make” ( Expanding Records, 2006 ). He currently lives with Rima, in a self converted 1976 wooden Bedford TK Horsebox that will be parked in woods here and there throughout the UK, whilst hand making various peculiar stringed things in
readiness for continued Orla Wren busking in the towns of Europe. It’s not quite Scanner... 'The One Two Bird And The Half Horse' is the second album from Orla Wren. Recorded over the last two years in the environs of an isolated cold water cottage in the Scottish hills, it develops Tui’s happy obsession with rendering the minutiae of nature into sonic form, combining the oldest, wonkiest most organic of possible sound sources, instrumental or otherwise, fashioned into textures of pinprick detail. A wide array of stylistically disparate musical and vocal collaborators, from places as varied as Japan, the Georgian Republic and 'down-home' U.K., lend their weight to the process, alternately spooking and soothing the music, filtered through Tui’s “wires” into an intensely colorful democratic weave. Orla Wren is a dream child. It’s surfaces may be brilliantly modern,but it’s soul is ancient and gently unfolds itself in a  ontemplative manner, revealing the antiquated isolation of the environments that have inspired it. It distils sublime wood smoke folk atmosphere and pointallist digitalis to the subatomic level, until it becomes effectively the same stuff that makes brooks babble and winds whisper. It’s the music that Fennesz and Lau Nau might make after a night laying beneath the glittering constellations.

Guests were ( including instruments that I played ) : Keiron Phelan (state river widening, phelan/sheppard), Russudan Meipariani, Jessica Constable, Clare Whyte, Moomlooo (smile down upon us), Simon Scott (ex Slowdive, Televise) and more.

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