ICE:
Cold Songs from the Northern Sisterhood of
Drums
Carolyn Hillyer
The
cold songs tell a very old story, of lives and lands long
hidden, of memories that lay frozen and wrapped within 25,000
years of time. The cold songs speak of the udegan
ice women, who walked out from the blue glaciers and who
are the embodiment of the most ancient relationship between
human people and the deep spirits of these northern lands.
The cold songs honour one thousand generations of ancestral
mothers and the daughters who still feel the stir of ancient
ice in their veins.
The
songs on this album were birthed during a dark phase of
the moon, in the deepest black of winter, through the long
silence of the Arctic nights. The Northern Sisterhood of
Drums is rooted in a time and landscape balanced on the
most ancient and distant edges of our imaginations and collective
memory. The sisterhood stems from the nine udegan
(elder, witch, grandmother, shaman) who emerged many thousands
of years ago from the glacial north of the last ice age,
called out by our foremothers as they grew into their relationship
with the primordial spirits of the cold lands. The udegan
have accompanied us through a thousand generations of women’s
northern spiritual traditions. They exist still within the
frozen body of the Arctic and as memories of ancient ice
far beneath the warmer skins and old melt waters of moor
and forest, heath and grassland.
The
album combines dark earthy chants and songs with skin drums,
many of which were made especially by Carolyn for this project.
Instruments include reindeer, horse, copper and salmon drums;
rattles, bone whistle, wooden flutes, dulcimer, cimbala,
jaw’s harp as well as source recordings made on location
in the Arctic.
Tracks include: The Mending Drum, Bear Claw Dance, Dogsled Travelling
Song, The Degna’s Dream of Fire, Wrapping the Bark, Dark
Smoke Prayer, Spindle of Lights, and We will carry them
forever in our scars.
Album time: 75 minutes
Ice is available on CD for £13
|
|
A place where I may feed