HOWL EP

In 2021 I co-founded the 9 piece london-based vocal ensemble HOWL, who sing experimental and contemporary classical music, folk arrangements and our own compositions. In spring 2022 HOWL were signed to the musician/producer Cosmo Sheldrake’s new label Tardigrade Records. We released an EP in June 2022, produced by Cosmo Sheldrake, which includes several of my compositions along with "Deer Park Canon" by Heloise Heloise Tunstall-Behrens. My three arrangements on this EP are all re-workings/re-imaginings of women's folk songs from the British Isles.

He Mandu is my adaptation of a traditional Scottish waulking song. “Waulking” is the process of working the cloth in order to make tweed, through soaking the fabric in urine and bashing it on a table. Waulking songs, often improvised, are sung by women as they work round the table. Originally in Gaelic, this version of He Mandu includes some English translation.

Greenwood Side is a re-working of a traditional English ballad dating back to the 18th century. A woman births her babies in the woods and murders them in a panic - later the babies come back to haunt her. 

Nobody Knew She Was There was written in the 1970s by Ewan Maccoll about his mother who worked as an office cleaner throughout his childhood in the 1930s.

Summer 2023