Sometimes it feels as though music doesn’t shake me the way it used to. I know I’ve spoken about this phenomenon before, but there’s some reality to be faced in having listened conscientiously to thousands of records and written about hundreds of them that seems to have affected how I approach music. Of course, this isn’t fair to the lovingly crafted and often very good music coming out all the time, and perhaps this is just a me problem, but I’ve seen and heard much over the years, and over time the threshold for powerful, resonant works has grown ever higher in contention with all of this baggage.
Combine that now with squeezing listening time in around work and life and I find I just don’t often get walloped by things anymore.
Considered me walloped here.
It’s rare indeed, 14 years in to the HearFeel project now, for me to sit down and be rendered speechless by the beauty of a new listen. Gleann Ciùin, the Quiet Glen, is an ode to the Cairngorms of Scotland lensed through organ and cello and synthetics, and what an ode this is to such a special place.
In the deep thrumming drones of opening “Turadh”, a dry spell between rain, I’m sunk back to the last time I saw the Cairngorms retreating behind me as I drove South in 2024. So struck was I then, as I am now in listening to Claire, that I wrote some small notes on the way home on its splendid form breaking through between squalls:
The Cairngorms rise like a wave, as undulating sine standing from the Earth, clouds cascading off the flanks of its Northern limits as I pass downward, homeward-
Interior “Rionnag a Tuath”, the North Star, emerges on beds of organ drone and tilting cello chords so rich, so delicate, that it feels as though I can hear the humming from the very photons themselves, yet no amount of volume seems enough to capture its splendour. A celestial point so well defined it outranks all others in a busy sky filled with wonders: ever present, ever dependable, beaming its gentle radiance to our kin across the ages. It is one of the most beautiful pieces I’ve heard in recent time.
And closing titular “Gleann Ciùin” returns the same impassioned sustains of the opener. It takes many minutes to find its height, but find it it does: deep elongate chords brimmed with the mass of far geologic time settling, before cello strings arrive to glide in their shadow. Towering earthen peaks push the sky apart to form the valley between, a ribbon of delicate water glinting within as some quiet burn escapes the ancient stone and wriggles its way out and out to sea.
Even the interstitial moments, brief <3min pieces whose coordinates point to locations on the Lairig Gru and in Lochnagar, tickle the senses pleasingly, though not as dramatically. They burble with forgotten electronics, fragments of spindrift synths to haunt the hills and glens in memory and in honour of spaces seen and loved.
Along with others amongst her contemporaries, the organ continues to be an instrument that inspires and evokes even in this age of atheism. It images the world in the vitally spiritual, distilling the essence of its grand form into harmonics that seem to reverberate inside the chambers of the very heart that falls in love with a place for what it is, what it feels like, reverberating what it means to us.
Simply a stunning, evocative record, filled impossibly with the same vast majesty of its muse.