Crowlink

Press for Crowlink EP

Pitchfork / The Quietus / The Big Take-Over / for folk’s sake / FATEA

Crowlink EP on Domino Recordings

Crowlink 1.916

Crowlink 1.916

Installation at Charleston House, July 31st, August 1st with Shirley Collins and the Lodestar band live.

Installation will continue on August 4th until the 8th.

Shirley Collins leads us with her recital of the English folk songs collected over seventy years. With poetry from Brian Catling and Matthew Shaw and fragments of letters, diaries and prose from Virgina Woolf, Vanessa Bell and the Bloomsbury group in Sussex.

These poems and extracted writings voiced in order of appearance by by Shirley Collins, Hannah Peel, Jeremy Deller, Lally MacBeth, Benjamin Zephaniah, Heather Leigh, Laura Barton, Zakia Sewell, Peter Owen Jones, Amy Grantham, Matthew Shaw, Mark Fry, Sam Lee & Virginia Woolf.

All music performed by Matthew Shaw

with special guests Ossian Brown on hurry-gurdy and Penny MacBeth on recorders.

Crowlink 0.5

Crowlink 0.5 shown at The Barbican on Sunday 23rd May 2021

Film & audio installation

Voices in order of appearance Shirley Collins, Hannah Peel, Lally MacBeth, Benjamin Zephaniah, Heather Leigh, Laura Barton, Zakia Sewell

Grant Gee - director

Matthew Shaw - score

Brian Catling - poetry

Ossian Brown - hurdy-gurdy

It is my pleasure to have composed a new piece of music for Heart's Ease, the truly wonderful album by Shirley Collins.

Order here from Domino Mart

Collins waits until the end of the album to stretch out with “Crowlink,” inspired by her own seaside ruminations. The piece recalls the woolier corners of 1971’s No Roses, her marvelous psych-rock foray with the Albion Country Band (an outfit that included her former husband). Her voice emerges amid the sounds of seabirds, crashing surf, and hurdy-gurdy and harmonium drone, winking at a sense of adventure undiminished by advanced years.

Allison Hussey, Pitchfork

“Crowlink, named after one of the singer’s favourite South Downs walks, and featuring Ossian Brown on droning hurdy-gurdy and Matthew Shaw providing electronics and field recordings from the actual location. With Collins’ voice drifting on the salt breeze amid eldritch synthesiser and harmonium tones, it’s a perfect, if unexpected way to end the record. After all, so much of folk music is based on the idea of the drone, and many traditional songs, especially when performed by a sensitive interpreter such as Collins, have an eeriness about them, like some primal transmission from an ancient, collective dream.”

Tom Pinnock, Uncut

“Most startling is the closing Crowlink, a tribute to Collins’s beloved South Downs, where a hurdy-gurdy drone conjures a mighty sky against which birdsong chafes and Collins’s voice briefly chants. It sounds like a pagan epiphany, or an emanation of the spirit of Albion from a born-again May Queen. Long may she reign. “

Neil Spencer, The Observer

“Most poignant of all is Crowlink. Built around sound recordings by Matthew Shaw and with Ossian Brown’s (Coil, Cyclobe)hurdy-gurdybraying in the electronica mists, it’s named after the cliff edge of the South Downs Way - Collins’ “favourite place to sit and gaze at the sea and think about what’s gone, and what is to come.” Seagulls skree. Waves collapse. Voices drone and drift.”

Mike Goldsmith, Record Collector

“Crowlink is a more experimental coda, full of field recordings of seagulls and storms, made by composer Matthew Shaw with Collins’ son, Bobby. Collins’ voice whirls in and out like a benevolent God.”

“Proud of prow among the thickets of guitar, dobro and hurdy-gurdy, her voice has grown in confidence, a stable life-raft in the stormy sea. Sately, ghostly magnificence.”

Jude Rogers, The Guardian

For the most part this is an album of traditional song. But it closes in a very different place with “Crowlink”. Again we are out at sea, this time with waves washing back and forth — the place where many of the songs, from “Tell Me True” to “Locked In Ice” have begun. But this time the song drones, as if unwilling to start. Finally, after a couple of minutes, Collins sings as if from far off. This is the voice of a ship “on the velvet sea/doomed to travel endlessly”. Gulls croak. The voice recedes. The waves take back over.”

David Honigmann, Financial Times

“album closer ‘Crowlink’ seems to repay that gratitude. A sustained blackening cloud of a drone from a hurdy-gurdy, the track is wintry and experimental, Collins’ voice phasing in and out of view as if from above. Her dour Sussex intonation slips in and out of earshot, incanting lines from ‘Locked in Ice’.”

Fergal Kinney, LOUD AND QUIET

“the drone-heavy ‘Crowlink’ is essentially Sunn O))) let loose in Cecil Sharp House – it’s a real banquet, a feat of folk re-contextualisation driven forward by the sharp emotional instincts of its formidable maker.”

Robin Murray, CLASH

“Heart's Ease rejects ahistorical readings of folk music and narratives. In this way, Collins also uses the album to concretely connect the past to modernity. The closer, "Crowlink", is named after the area on the South Downs overlooking the English Channel. It blends a hurdy-gurdy with electronica and field recordings of waves and sea birds. It is surprisingly experimental but without being at odds with the more traditional folk aesthetic. In fact, "Crowlink", as is Heart's Ease, are formidable signifiers of Collins' continuing contribution to folk music's evolution. “

Pop Matters

“The most striking utterance is saved for last. Crowlink is a portrait of one of Collins’ favourite English beauty spots, one of the Seven Sisters where the South Downs meet the sea. Though it brings back Locked In Ice in its lyrical content, it has the broad brush of field recordings made on location by Matthew Shaw, who adds sensitively voiced electronics as Jon Hopkins might have done for King Creosote. Intimacy is replaced by expanse, and Collins’ voice appears as an apparition. It is a poignant epilogue, an out of body experience that serves a pointer for a potential next artistic move.”

Ben Hogwood, MUSIC OMH

“She blends the old and the new seamlessly, and picks up this refrain on the final track on the album, ‘Crowlink’, which veers suddenly away from folk convention. Her vocals drift over a blend of hurdy-gurdy and the crash of waves and sea-birds. “I was locked in ice, half a hundred years”. It feels haunting, unexpected. She has the power to surprise and delight.”

Eve Willis, The Quietus

“a thrilling experimental finale called Crowlink, which builds up an uncanny patchwork of field recordings and dark drones before Collins’ voice filters back in, singing snatches of song from earlier in the album as gulls cry overhead and waves crash. It is an audacious piece, but somehow Collins’ presence makes it fit perfectly with what has gone before. It seems rooted in her home county of Sussex, the place that helped to form her distinctive voice, but it is also universal and provides a tantalising glimpse of what may still be to come in this long and outstanding musical career.”

Thomas Blake, Folk radio

“Proud of prow among the thickets of guitar, dobro and hurdy-gurdy, her voice has grown in confidence, a stable life-raft in the stormy sea. Stately, ghostly magnificence.”

“The intriguing instrumental closer, ‘Crowlink’, mixes field recordings and the ambiences of hurdy-gurdy and fiddle to atmospheric effect”

Tim Cumming, Songlines

“the album concludes by entering a new world. “Crowlink” melds white-noise synthesiser, droning hurdy-gurdy, harmonium and recordings of birds and the wash of the ocean to create a discomfiting underpinning for Collins’s voice. Disembodied and distant, she sings only a few lines: about a ship travelling endlessly on a velvet sea. Although unlike anything else she has recorded before, its atmospheric kinship is with the most intense tracks she and Dolly made together.”

Kieron Tyler, The I Paper / The Arts Desk

“Striking closer “Crowlink” is almost entirely instrumental, featuring an enchanting combination of hurdy gurdy and field recordings; for a fleeting moment you can hear Collins’ voice through the mist, but it vanishes so quickly that you begin to wonder if it was really there.”

Emma Bauchner, BEATS PER MINUTE

“The album closes with a whipping wind and harsh sea crashing against the rocks before the listener is left with an imposing hurdy-gurdy refrain. The song is entitled ‘Crowlink’ and it’s unlike anything else on the album. Her voice is a distant instrument, we are far from traditional folk terrain here and it’s refreshing to see someone push themselves this deep into their career. I guess she’s been making up for lost ground for a while now and has nothing to lose.”

Mark Buckley, for folk’s sake

“Crowlink, a broodingly atmospheric English Channel tone-painting-cum-sound-composition by Matthew Shaw based around an ominous hurdy gurdy drone, wave-washed electronica and the cries of sea birds, into which is woven at one point a sample of Shirley singing a brief segment of Locked In Ice. Seen as a creative cinematic corollary to Locked In Ice, Crowlink is bold and elemental”

David Kidman, FATEA

“Closer “Crowlink” is a newly commissioned piece drien by Ossian Brown’s eerie hurdy-gurdy drones and a soundscape of noise and field recordings by Matthew Shaw. A tribute to the seaside cliff of South Downs where Collins spends her time, the song is just as much a disquieting reflection on the fading of life, using new techniques to capture folk’s longstanding interest in the dispassion of time’s passage and the ephemera of life.”

Jake Cole, Spectrum Culture

“Heart's Ease looks forward as well as back, demonstrated on album closer Crowlink, named after a pathway on the South Downs overlooking the English Channel, a discordant soundscape of hurdy-gurdy, synthesiser and field recordings of birds.”

Alex Green, Belfast Telegraph

“Crowlink, the closing song, features the ambiance of crashing waves and bird chirps over sustained electronic notes and Collins’ buried voice. It’s an intriguing effect akin to the neo-psychedelia of Doves.”

Blake Michelle, mxdwn.com

“Crowlink, wo ambiente Feldaufnahmen mit Drehleier und Liedfetzen kombiniert werden.”

Hanspeter Künzler, Tagblatt

“O nella conclusiva Crowlink, dove alla classica strumentazione acustica si accostano anche i sintetizzatori, a dimostrazione di una vitalità e di una capacità di ampliamento dei propri orizzonti che non ti aspetti da una donna di 85 anni che è una sorta di monumento vivente del folk. In tutto questo, con la sua classe calma, Shirley Collins continua a essere perfettamente riconoscibile, sempre se stessa, fuori dal tempo eppure così contemporanea.”

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