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harmonium nochdaidh [+ an bunnan bui]

from The Whiteadder Tapes by OOR_Scintilla

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Improvised harmonium keys + bellows, words + vocal harmonies | oscillating calls of | Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna poetry of the dispossessed | looped ground recordings | + coda of ‘an bunnan bui’ ‘(the yellow bittern’)

lyrics

Paddy Tunney’s translation of 'an bunnan bui': the yellow bittern a shining variant of Cathal Buí Mac Giolla Ghunna's wry beautiful empathy with the bittern's frozen head first into Lough Lough MacNean, dying for want of a drink it’s absence felt in no booming call. A hand to the Irish workers travelling to build the dam at the hungry snout.

Was the break of day but no bittern's horn filled the waking morn with its hollow boom
For I found him prone by the bare flag blown by the lough shore lone where he met his doom
His legs were sunk in the slime and slunk; a hostage held in the fangs of frost
O you of knowledge lament his going; for want of liquor his life was lost

O bittern bright it's my thousand woes that the rooks and crows are all pleasure bound
With the rats and mice as they cross the ice to indulge in vice at your funeral mound
Had word reached me of your awful plight on the ice I'd smite and the water free
You'd have all the lake your thirst to slake and we'd hold no wake for the Bunnan Bui

O it's not the blackbird that I'm bewailing or thrush assailing the blossom bray
But my bittern yellow that hearty fellow who has my hue and my wilful ways
By the loughshore bank he forever drank and his sorrow sank in the rolling wave
Come sun or rain every drop I'll drain for the cellar's empty beyond the grave

credits

from The Whiteadder Tapes, released September 4, 2020

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OOR_Scintilla Edinburgh, UK

OOR_Scintilla (Louisa Love + Clive McLachlan Powell) are a Scotland based experimental artist duo exploring the material poetics of sound, voice and place.

Working with numerous forms of resonance across field recording, instruments, electronics + the voice, they produce environmentally-responsive work investigating hybrid and enigmatic territories with reference to ancient folk origins. ... more

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