CAROLYN & NIGEL
are renowned musicians & artists who live and work on a thousand-year-old farm in the ancient belly of Dartmoor, a mist-veiled landscape of wild hills, peat bogs and heather moors in the south-west of England. The inspiration for all their work is drawn from the raw beauty, untamed spirit and primordial memory of this ancestral land. Their creative output includes music albums and concerts, books and workshops, paintings and art installations, traditional flute and drum making. They have built a large Neolithic-style roundhouse at their farm, a ceremonial ancestor house created from granite, oak and grass/reed thatch, which sits at the heart of the teaching circles and gatherings they host on their land. Their recorded albums (such as Weaving the Land and Nine Prayers North) and live performances form a mystical weave of ancient instruments, wild songs and tender music, using wooden flutes, clay & tin whistles, overtone flutes, piano, small pipes, dulcimer, Jura guitar, cello, many types of hand drums and percussion.
They make many of their own instruments and regularly teach flute and drum making on Dartmoor. Nigel carves flutes that carry the songs of these islands, using woods indigenous to Britain, including oak, yew, ash, holly and thorn. Carolyn creates traditional frame drums from skins sourced from the moor and prepared by hand at their farm, primarily red deer, wild horse and salmon. They have travelled across 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 Dartmoor to Scotland, from mountain temple to tundra camp, from festival tent to ritual cave. On their Dartmoor farm they regularly host concert events that have included Rivenstone, a much-loved festival of sacred world music, as well as intimate evenings of music and myth shared beneath the canopy of a beautiful tent hung within a grove of trees.
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 his ability to infuse his music with a powerful yearning for wild nature have come to define a unique approach to sacred sound. Classic albums such as The River and Echoes of the Ancient Forest continue to be widely cherished decades after their initial release. In 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 vintage festival band Global.
CAROLYN
has written 12 solo albums and co-created many others with Nigel. Her early albums (House of the Weavers, Grandmother Turtle) have come to occupy an iconic place within women’s sacred music and other recordings (Weathered Edge, Cave of Elders, Wyched Wombe) have, over three decades, defined the essence and edges of her unusual perspective on women’s spiritual journeys and ancient mythological landscape. 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, recently including her first album of spoken tales (Winter Folded Everything) and a collection of vintage songs (This Place of Herons). Her paintings of life-size archetypal spirit women have been exhibited many times as shrine installations. Her books include the exceptionally popular Weavers’ Oracle, newly published song collection Wild Litany, original interpretation of the Proto-Celtic language Her Bone Bundle, as well as the series of volumes Book of Hag and classic work Sacred House. For over 30 years she has been teaching a series of powerful workshop journeys for women that braid together ritual song, intuitive ceremony, ancient initiations and direct interaction with wild land (now including an online teaching programme). She is founder of Thirteen Moons women’s festival.
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, humble business; our low broadband speeds and lack of mobile signal slows our engagement with the fast rivers of constant communication. 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 you may not get an immediate reply to your call or email, or receive your order with the same speed offered by big online companies – but bear with us, we will respond as soon as we can. We have very rarely offered 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. We do not have a large marketing budget but have prefered to grow our work through word-of-mouth and personal recommendation: a huge thanks to everyone who has helped us with that over the years. We love the visual and tactile aspects of a physical format for our albums and books so we spend a lot of time getting those just right. These days we are able to produce all our albums in card covers and the paper used for our printed material is from fully recycled or sustainable sources. We are very happy when you decide to buy our music on a CD but all our titles are available as full album downloads. We hope you will continue to enjoy both the digital and the physical body of our work! 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.
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 royalty collecting agencies that are responsible for collecting royalty payments for the public performance of music. In recent years they have been increasingly keen in their pursuit of small businesses and individual projects for large licence payments on behalf of their musician members. We have been contacted by many of our customers about this, some of whom have even decided to stop playing music on their premises. Although we are members of these agencies, we do not feel that all aspects of the licensing system that are imposed on smaller businesses are working to the benefit of either independent musicians or our customers. Therefore we are happy to issue individual permission letters to people who buy from us or sell our music which will allow you to play our work without a performance licence. These documents lay out the terms of the permission and can be presented to the agency if required. Please contact us if you need help with this. However with regard to music sharing websites, we add our voices to those of many musicians who sing out: if you like what we create, please help our craft by buying from us. Thank you so much to everyone who does just that; we are still able to produce our work because you continue to support it.
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 thirty years. Thank you for sharing our music, books, paintings, drums, flutes, concerts, festivals, exhibitions and workshops – and for coming to share 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 planet and our human connection with the Earth. With all our love to you.