CAROLYN & NIGEL
are renowned musicians & artists who have lived and worked on their ancient hill farm in the deep heart of Dartmoor for 30 years. Their work is inspired by the raw beauty, untamed spirit and primordial memory of sacred and ancestral land. Their creative output includes music albums and concerts, books and workshops, paintings and art installations, traditional instrument making and the creation of a large neolithic-style ceremonial roundhouse on their farm. Their live performances and recorded albums form a mystical weave of ancient instruments, wild songs and tender music, using many instruments they have crafted themselves. They have travelled around the world with their work, including Australia, USA, Japan, Jamaica, Canada, Central & South America, Siberian Arctic, Russia, throughout Europe and Britain. Their concert tours have carried them from mountain temple to tundra camp, from festival tent to ritual cave; they also regularly host intimate evenings of music and myth on Dartmoor.
NIGEL
founded Seventh Wave Music in 1985 and over forty years has produced a profound and diverse collection of recordings. His soul-filled instrumental works and ability to infuse his music with a powerful yearning for wild nature have come to define his unique approach to sacred sound. His early albums, such as The River and Echoes of the Ancient Forest, continue to be widely cherished decades after their initial release. In more recent years he has composed a series of gentle albums that honour the sweet and raw ancient moorland landscape (Dartmoor Journey, Dartmoor Roundhouse, Flow) the soft beauty of night (Nocturnes) and the intricacy of the mourning journey (Requiem). He composed and recorded Dartmoor Symphony as a live orchestral project, and has created and directed musically dynamic projects with the albums Bones (a celebration and lament for ancient people and remembered land), Ancestors (inspired by songs of the indigenous people of the Siberian Arctic) and Exile (honouring the human experience of displacement). He is co-founder and performer with Bamboo Cedar Oak, a brotherhood of master flute players that includes Guillermo Martinez (USA) and Hiroki Okano (Japan). His work continues to encompass wilder strands of electronic dance music with the festival band Global Collective. In his workshop Nigel carves traditional flutes that carry the songs of these islands, using woods indigenous to Britain, and each year teaches ceremonial flute-making master classes on Dartmoor and elsewhere.
CAROLYN
has braided painting, writing, singing, workshop teaching, drum-making and other creative strands into her work over the last 30 years. She has written 13 solo albums and co-created many others with Nigel. Her early albums (House of the Weavers, Grandmother Turtle) occupy an iconic place within women’s sacred music and over three decades, she has accumulated a potent collection of songs and chants born from hearth mysteries, feral trails, the weave of magic and the power of sister circles (Cave of Elders, Wyched Wombe, The Creel & The Crock & The Cauldron). Her paintings of life-size archetypal spirit women define the essence and edges of her unusual perspective on women’s spiritual journeys and the ancient mythological landscape; she has exhibited them many times as large shrine installations, including her most recent exhibition featuring the Mûkthno Wailî (Ancestral Marsh Women). Her series of books include the exceptionally popular Weavers’ Oracle, her extensive song collection Wild Litany, Book of Hag (two volumes). her original interpretation of the Proto-Celtic language: Her Bone Bundle, and her classic work Sacred House. For over 30 years she has created and guided powerful workshop journeys for women that weave together ritual song, intuitive ceremony, ancient initiations and direct interaction with wild land. Her workshops take place on Dartmoor, around the world and online, including her online international teaching programme, Weavers’ Trail: A Women’s Soul Pilgrimage.
SEVENTH WAVE MUSIC
is a long-established, organically grown, truly independent music label. It began in Nigel’s London basement in 1985, moved from being a solo enterprise into a partnership in 1992, arrived on Dartmoor the same year, and finally landed at Lower Merripit Farm in 1995. It consists of the two of us, with a small office that used to be a dairy, a studio that was once a hay loft and a store room where cows were wintered in years long gone. We run a gentle, steady-paced, simple business that is continually nourished by the wild land outside our door. As performing musicians we spend time away from the farm every year performing concerts. At home we share our time between office, studios, making instruments, running workshops, organising events and the seasonal cycle of tending the land. For this reason we support the concept of slow shopping – we may take a few days to pack and post your order! We do not offer our work through large online retailers or other distributors and have always retained hands-on control of how our music and publications are designed, produced, promoted and sold. Our work has been supported by word-of-mouth and personal recommendation: a huge thanks to everyone who has helped to spread the word about our work over the years. Our aim has always been to maintain integrity and authenticity in our work by building on small but strong foundations; offering music that is created with care and which strives for the highest quality we can achieve; being fair to customers, honouring to audiences, grateful to those who support what we do; remembering to acknowledge the sacred land that inspires us and the people from whom we learn; sharing our land as much and in as many ways as we can.
BRAIDED RIVER BOOKS
was founded by Carolyn in 2020 as a vessel to produce and sell her growing number of publications. She has been writing books since 1994 but really anchored this work with Sacred House: Where Women Weave Words into the Earth in 2010. It was the Weavers’ Oracle, published in 2016, which started to fly her words on wings around the world. The Oracle has continued to sit at the heart of her book list, with a broad international reach and now translated into German, Russian and Slovakian editions. These translations have been created by women who have worked with Carolyn over a long period of time, who have dived deep into the writing and decided that an edition is needed in their own language. They work closely with Carolyn over the course of the translating journey, which may take two to three years, and complete the process with rituals for each oracle weaver (with thanks to Johanna, Elena R, Elena T, Evgeniya, Zuzana, Katka and Danica). In 2017 Carolyn began to research and awaken the neglected bones of the Proto-Celtic Bronze Age ancestral language of these islands, eventually publishing Her Bone Bundle, a beautiful interpretation of this ancient mother tongue. Her series of volumes entitled Book of Hag is now on its second season (with two more to arrive as she slowly ages in linear time). All her books encompass her paintings, which are often key ingredients to the unfurling mythologies within her writing. Braided River Books does not use distributors or large online sellers; everything is printed locally to Dartmoor, produced and packed at our farm (literally on the kitchen table) and sent out around the world from our front door.
COPYRIGHT AND LICENSING
All our music is under full copyright and ownership to us and therefore cannot be used in the course of recording or creating other projects without our written permission. You are welcome to contact us directly if you have a project in mind in which you would like to involve our music. With respect to the playing of our music in independent shops, healing centres, meditation classes and therapy rooms, PRS and PPL are two commercial agencies responsible for collecting royalty payments for the public performance of music. Please note that we are no longer members of these organisations – after decades of membership we no longer feel that the licensing system operates to the benefit of either independent musicians or our customers. Therefore you do not need a PRS or PPL performance licence in order to play our music in a public location. If you have any difficulty with these agencies regarding our work please contact us. However…
WILDSTREAM
… the culture of accessing free music through streaming or music sharing websites does not generally help musicians like us to sustain our livelihoods. We have created a new music and audio streaming app which enables you to join our subscriber community and access everything we have created over 40 years plus lots of new exclusive content. In doing so you are helping us, and other independent musicians, to keep producing our work. Thank you so much to everyone who supports our music in this way. You can find out about our music app here: Wildstream
GRATITUDE
Some final words of gratitude to all of you for enjoying, supporting, caring about, participating in, applauding, reading, dancing to, dreaming with and being enthusiastic about our work, this year and during the last forty years! Thank you for sharing our music, books, paintings, drums, flutes, concerts, festivals, exhibitions and workshops – and for coming to experience the beauty, peace and magic of our Dartmoor land with us. By doing all this you enable us to continue to envision and create, and to find new ways of contributing to the precious work that we are all engaged with: the protection, honouring and celebration of this Earth and our human connection with her.