The story
Lost Songs of Scilly attempts to re-imagine a music that may never have existed… If the Isles of Scilly - that outrageously beautiful archipelago of granite and sand scattered in the wide Atlantic - ever had a distinct indigenous music, it has been lost to the forces of time. This is in contrast to neighbouring Cornwall and to other remote British Islands - Shetland, Orkney - which all have have their own rich traditions, laced with a Celtic wildness that speaks strongly of their isolated locations and heart-stopping landscapes.
With no tradition of Scillonian music to draw from, islander Piers Lewin and close friend John Patrick Elliott have been on a mission to conjure these islands into sound(waves) - like a pair of modern-day musical Prosperos - for over fifteen years. Along the way, they have tried to give voice and song to all those unheard islanders and sailors lost to the great expanses of time, tide and silence. The immersive journey has taken them deep into Scillonian culture, landscape and community and has inspired a lengthy back catalogue - over a dozen albums featuring original material of huge stylistic diversity: the product of their struggles to bring to the surface a version of authentic musical island truth.
For Piers and John, Lost Songs of Scilly is a powerful distillation of all that they have created and absorbed over the years, weaving together the many strands of their vision of island music. Foot-stomping tunes and emotionally-charged songs of the sea emerge here like shiny new beach pebbles in the hand from a richly-layered texture of ambient soundscapes and glitching field recordings; organic electronic loops and spoken word.
In an unexpected twist, they found over the years that, the more they focused in on the precise culture, nature and sounds of Scilly, the more they became attuned to the universality of island life everywhere, and the central (if precarious) position of islands at the frontline of urgent issues in the modern world. The themes and ideas generated by this realisation tangle and collide across the album in a fresh way as Lost Songs of Scilly seeks to blend the specific with the mythic, connecting the fragments of Scilly with a resonant global sense of ‘island-ness’ and its imminent losses.
