FOLK RADIO UK ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2019

Folk Radio review by Thomas Blake

Jonathan Day is a musician of movement and a musician of place. Those two things are not the same – it is possible to be one without being the other – but in Day’s music the ideas of travel and of engagement with a vast and ever-changing physical world are of such importance that they have come to define his entire musical identity. Day grew up in the shadow of heavy industry and tall buildings, and his career as a musician has seen him attempt to distance himself – both physically and, we might say, spiritually – from a world in which progress is defined in the strictly human terms of size, wealth and power to a place where natural processes are given primacy. Of course, nowhere on Earth is completely free of human influence, and Day is well aware of this. His music describes the landscapes he visits but it also engages with the people who inhabit those landscapes.



The resulting music is rooted in deep time. It is aware of humanity, of the Anthropocene and of the damaged world, but it also transcends all that. Day is, after all, a songwriter. He crafts things of beauty, and the tools of his trade are the instruments he discovers on his travels. Spirit Library is his third studio album, and it is something of a synthesis of the themes of human creation and the natural world that have preoccupied him since 2011’s Carved In Bone.



Stylistically speaking, Day has become more assured and more experimentally minded. The title track, which opens the album, enters on a sweep of strings (courtesy of the Kailash Maanke string quartet) and seemingly owes more to modern classical and film music than to traditional folk. It is airy and refreshing and acts as a kind of cleanser – the musical equivalent of clearing your mind before beginning an important task. In Memory, A Crossing Of Great Seas is more representative of Day’s style. His voice is deep, generous: at once familiar and mysterious. An otherworldly glide and shimmer is provided by Gavin Monaghan’s glass armonica (that most unreal, delicate-sounding of instruments, invented by Benjamin Franklin) and the song, like much of the album, is underpinned by Day’s accomplished guitar playing.



By the time we get to A Woman Made Of Leaves Has Labradorite Eyes the album has started to settle into a unified sound. Day’s songwriting and vocal delivery strangely reminiscent of Nick Cave’s quieter moments, albeit with an approach that is more impressionistic and more optimistic. The tune itself is apparently simple, but the range of emotions it conveys is impressive, and part of this is down to the judicious and subtle use of unusual instrumentation – in this case the saung gauk, a Burmese horizontal harp that Day learned to play while travelling in Asia. The delicate filigree of the saung gauk also features on Gone To Earth, one of the most sprightly, upbeat songs here, which also introduces gentle licks of electric guitar. It takes its inspiration from Mary Webb’s novel of the same name, which is set among the Shropshire hills that Day calls home. It is an example of how, in his philosophy, travel and belonging are inextricably linked.



Cajsa’s Tears (Les Mariées Perdues) provides possibly the album’s most moving moment, and its centrepiece. A lengthy ballad, musically stripped-back and lyrically intense, its chorus of ‘I will honour you for as long as I endure’ is instantly memorable. But, this being Day, it is more than just a torch song, and it takes a few listens for the layers of meaning to become apparent. From A High Stone Gallery, Open To The Sea, I See It Is New Year seems comparatively simple, lightweight even, flitting in on a recording of birdsong and leaving in little over two minutes. But even here there are hidden depths. It is a song of regeneration, of nature’s capacity for newness, and its narrator seals his closeness to the landscape with striking snippets of visual imagery, like the belt ‘clasped with a dormouse skull.’



On Lost Languages Cafe Day plays melancholy chords on a harmonium and the song becomes a lament for the fragility of everything human, a tacit acceptance that things cannot last, at least not without changing, while on Pipistrelle Fly Beneath A Vault Of Stars he observes nature with a poet’s eye for detail and ear for original language. Descriptive lines like ‘cinnabar-eyed king of the sky’ and ‘as the evening’s cirrus curtains close’ suggest a deep immersion in the natural world, a gift for listening and observing that goes hand in hand with the gift of creating.



But as well these unique observations of the present, Spirit Library is equally impressive when it comes to chronicling the past. 9th June 1924 documents the last days of mountaineers George Mallory and Andrew Irvine, whose attempt to reach the summit of Everest resulted in the deaths of both men. Day’s song – which is incredibly moving despite the passage of years – is inspired by their memoirs, and tells their story in language that is spare, beautiful and at times brutal. An important and often ignored part of the expedition is how it brought together and perhaps enriched two distinct cultures. Day does not ignore this – in fact, he embodies it by making use of eastern instruments – including the Chinese zither or guzheng.



Day’s most reliable instrument is perhaps his voice. It is showcased most effectively on Sanctuary, another raw, slow-burning, highly personal song with an unexpectedly tender heart. And on the album’s instrumental closing track, In A Hall of Ravens, A Harp Is Tangled With The Books, he plays field recordings of birds of against an almost impossibly delicate harp melody. The effect is of being drawn into a light and calming sleep, as if a destination has been reached and the album has come full circle. It is the work of an artist who, whether through the experience of travel or through deep contemplation of his surroundings, has come to terms with his place in the world, and it is utterly beautiful.