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Jenny Sturgeon has a history of augmenting her original songs with experimental recording techniques and using music to react to nature, literature and visual art. Her second solo album, 2020’s The Living Mountain, was a sonic companion piece to Nan Shepherd’s pioneering work of nature writing and saw her construct a suite of songs around a single continuous field recording made in the Cairngorms. Although she has been busy with a variety of collaborative releases in the intervening years, paths.made.walking is her first solo record since The Living Mountain, and on it, she leans more heavily into concept and experimentation, and, in particular, the use of field recording. Each track is a kind of diary entry, a snapshot of a place through its variety of sounds. Here, she dispenses entirely with the idea of song, allowing the landscape to speak of and for itself.
The concept itself is relatively simple but impressive in scale: Sturgeon embarked on an 864 km walk from the south to the north of Scotland, an immense physical feat in its own right. She recorded a new snippet of sound every day and named each after its What3words geolocation code. The result is anything but simple: presented together, these thirty-three tracks form a complex aural essay which touches on everything from the history of industry to the loss of natural habitats via a number of social, political, ecological and psychogeographical themes. The sheer variety of these sounds is the first thing you notice: the first track, opens.chin.quicksand, features a skylark’s song cutting through the thick hum of insects, while baked.skies.hamsters, which immediately follows it, is characterised by the bubble of flowing water. The beauty of the titles is that they enable you to pinpoint exactly where Sturgeon made each recording – in this case, on the banks of the Tweed not far from Dryburgh Abbey – so that you can essentially follow her route.
The effect of a sound removed from the visual evidence of its cause can be meditative – as is the case in some of the waterside recordings – or uncanny. It sometimes takes a second or two to identify, for example, the surprising eeriness of a moving bicycle, and by the time it resolves into familiarity, it is gone, leaving only a cuckoo’s nostalgic call in its wake. A lot of these pieces, particularly the early ones, present a gleaming landscape, a bucolic picture of a Scotland that you might think hasn’t existed since pre-industrial times. But there are often reminders of modernity too – the drone of distant motorways or the threatening roar of a single vehicle passing at close range. An aeroplane sounds like a reverberating string. Rain on a tent becomes an otherworldly crackle, like a transmission from another time on an ancient piece of alien technology.
On one occasion, Sturgeon breaks her own rule and inserts a vocal passage. This happens in minder.booms.open, which captures her wordless singing in a canal tunnel under the M8. Here, the eeriness and meditativeness meet head on, and the effect is powerful and surprising. This and another longer piece, churn.squashes.easily, form the album’s twin reflective hearts. The latter features the competing melodies of song thrush and blackbird and acts as a kind of midway break on Sturgeon’s journey, both cleansing and thought-provoking. Birdsong plays a huge part on many of these recordings, and it makes you just what it would have sounded like a couple of centuries ago when songbirds were many times more common than they are now.
But paths.made.walking is about more than just the journey and its ecological narrative. It is aware of its place in relation to contemporary art: not just sound art and field recording, but the land art of Richard Long. The title is surely a nod to Long’s famous piece A Line Made by Walking, the epic minimalism of which is reflected in Sturgeon’s practice. It could also be a reference to so-called ’desire paths’, which are essentially folk footpaths tracing the most desirable route between two points, often to the chagrin of town planners or landowners. So, even at this level, there are art historical and political shades to Sturgeon’s work. And those strange titles add a further layer of mystery: they estrange the listener from literal meaning, inviting the uncanny. So the brag of rooks and jackdaws overwhelming the distant bellow of farm animals could be interpreted either as sinister or bucolic (or perhaps it shouldn’t be interpreted at all).
More than anything, paths.made.walking is a chronicle of sound, and as such, it is a folk-art treatise on the state of the Scottish rural nation. And, encouragingly, it is full of hope: a reminder that there are still places where, even amid the constant harangue of midges, the chortling of game birds or the anxious bleating of sheep, a kind of escape is still possible, and a connection with the natural world is still something worth seeking.
paths.made.walking (6th September, 2024) Hudson Records (Digital)
Pre-Order here: https://jennysturgeon.bandcamp.com/album/paths-made-walking
