Mouth Music - Seafaring Man

From the home studio where he made Seafaring Man, Mouth Music's Martin Swan looks out over a magnificent landscape populated only by trees, sheep and the endless Scottish sky. Except for the passage of the seasons, it's a timeless and unchanging scene and when he's not making music, this is where Swan spends his time. Chopping wood, lambing when in season, or simply walking for hours and drinking in the beauty.

"I've been plunged elbow deep into nature and it creates a fantastic balance in which to make music," he says. "I think the result is a more tranquil and introspective album than I've made before. There's a bit more breathing out and it's more acoustic. I've tried to put together different musical elements in a fresh and novel way but I hope there is no artifice about the album."

Rest assured. Seafaring Man is a pretence free zone, the warmest, most emotionally satisfying and organic sounding album of Mouth Music's career. The subtle, scuffed-up beats blended with traditional folk influences and global rhythms that have become Mouth Music's trademark are still there. But this time around they sound as natural as the rolling Borders country where Swan now lives. Seafaring Man is not his back to the roots album. He never left them. But inspired by his new environment, it is more profoundly in touch with those roots than ever before.

Mouth Music burst onto the roots scene with a striking debut album in 1991, combining Swan's experimental soundscapes with the vvoice of Gaelic singer Talitha MacKenzie. The dramatic mélange of traditional sounds and breakbeats made an immediate impact with world music fans and global dance fusionists alike. A second album, Mo Di followed in 1992 and in 1994 came Shorelife, which featured the expressive voice of Jackie Joyce.

After Shorelife, Mouth Music signed to Nation Records and spent a year working on an album that never came out. Then, with Joyce having left to pursue a solo career as Helicopter Girl, Swan made an album for Paddy Moloney' Wicklow imprint. The label folded before the record could be released. Thankfully the album wasn't lost and is now released as Seafaring Man on the new independent label Meta 4.

But there were other changes going on in the world of Mouth Music. Swan moved out of Edinburgh and into a forester's cottage on an estate in the Borders. He took up carpentry, immersed himself in rural life and began making music that reflected his environment. "I messed around with a lot of non-essential stuff in Edinburgh," he says. "When you are surrounded by seasonal change, you are more aware of the passing of time."

One of the noticeable differences between Seafaring Man and Mouth Music's previous output is that the dance grooves are less prominent. "The beats are pretty firmly on the way out." Swan says. "The way Mouth Music used to work was to juxtapose sounds in a very conceptual way. On this album it flows more naturally and I think as a result it's a lot more cohesive."

Seafaring Man finds Swan playing not only guitar, keyboards and bass, but hammered dulcimer, a bowed psaltery, berimbau, autoharp, a junk shop accordion and a huge assortment of African and Arabic percussion. With a battery of sounds like that at his disposal he hardly needs samples.

But at the core of the sound remains a strongly Gaelic influence, and, of course, the human voice. Swan has always enjoyed the freedom of being able to call upon different voices in Mouth Music, and Seafaring Man is no exception. In addition to his own voice, Michaela Rowan returns to the fold after a gap of several years and is joined by the Gaelic singer Ishbel McCaskill and Martin Furey from one of Ireland's foremost musical families.

"The different voices give you a lot of freedom," he says. "I've never seen Mouth Music as a group. It's always been me with different people joining to play live. But in the studio I think I've now found exactly the sort of voices I'd always been searching for but had despaired of finding."

All but two of the songs are Swan's own compositions. "They're kind of autobiographical but in a lateral way," he says. "They're not about me but a lot of the characters lead similar lives to me. I tried to avoid being consciously poetic and instead to evoke different environments and emotions."

Yet the strange thing is that it is almost impossible to tell which songs are contemporary and which are traditional. Somehow Swan's own compositions such as Whaling Ship and the title track seem not only to be carved from the same oak but also to share the same weathered patina. "I am making traditional vernacular music," he says. "You can have a very narrow, revisionist view of being a traditional musician. Seafaring Man is my broader take on it."