Jack McNeill
Chamber Cairn launch concert
Cumbrian artist Jack McNeill launches his debut solo album Chamber Cairn at Full of Noises.
Experience Jack perform this unbelievable long-player in the intimate surroundings of Piel View House.
Chamber Cairn in Jack's words:
"I hear it as a kind of contemporary instrumental folk music for this landscape I call home, the continuation of a line, the keeping of a flame..."
Chamber Cairn is a personal waymarker, recorded shortly before the birth of my son and moving as a family to steward a woodland in Cumbria. It felt important to document this moment in my musical journey, as I wasn't sure when, or if I might be able to return.
It was recorded in two days, deep in the Cumbrian landscape.
I hope it's heard as subterranean, airborne, connected to the ancient but very much speaking from the present. I hear it as a kind of contemporary instrumental folk music for this landscape I call home, the continuation of a line, the keeping of a flame.
The four main pieces are interspersed with musical "Cairns" - improvisations using sound tables, stones and whistles. I commissioned the two tables from a local woodworker out of olive ash. They are tools for composing with gesture and amplifying ideas about soundscape ecology in my creative practice, I use them to make composition accessible to communities of people without needing a prior instrumental language.
Jack McNeill
I play clarinet and bass clarinet, write music and make things that happen between the worlds of live music, theatre and radio. With a background rooted in contemporary classical performance practice and an interest in folk and ancient resonances, the work I make moves between the seams that tie these elements together. I’m the Artistic Director of Propellor, a 12-piece cross-genre ensemble - a creative engine based in Cumbria - whose performances, installations and multimedia projects map our collective experience of the natural world, through the lens of soundscape ecology.
https://www.jackmcneill.co.uk
Images above and below - Jack McNeill by Land and Sky Media
