Erland Cooper, Scottish multi-instrumentalist and composer, released his latest album, Carve the Runes Then Be Content With Silence, to mark 100 years since the birth of celebrated Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown. In 2021, Cooper planted the only physical copy of the album in the earth, to let nature take its course, releasing the music only when it was eventually discovered.
The tape was buried with the score, a note with instructions on how to return it, and a cheap, mass-produced violin, with copies of the score being kept safe by three custodians: musician Paul Weller, novelist Ian Rankin, and presenter Elizabeth Alker. A couple in Orkney found the master tape in late 2022 after following Erland’s cryptic clues, and it has since been digitised so audiences can experience how nature affected the physical tape.
How did the idea of the album, and burying it, come about?
I like to use the word ‘planted’ rather than burying. Burying somehow feels quite final, whereas planting, growing, roots, plants, the natural world… I like to use that analogy. I think it’s a coalescing of multiple ideas. It was coming up to the centenary of local poet George Mackay Brown, so I wanted to honour him. I had worked on multiple records that celebrated Scotland or Orkney, and it felt like a finished circle.
There was lots of wonderful writing and adjectives written about me being ‘nature’s songwriter’, and I was a bit embarrassed by that. I asked myself, ‘How can I try and live up to that a little bit more?’ How can I write, not like many other composers have written about the natural world — from Messiaen to Benjamin Britten, to Caroline Shaw — it’s quite normal.
But, I asked myself, I wonder if I could write with nature? Was there a way to do that, where the earth becomes a collaborator? And this process, the mixer and the master of the finished work, I think that all coalesced into this idea of planting.
In your previous album, Folded Landscapes, you feature [British Poet Laureate] Simon Armitage, and I saw a show of yours in Edinburgh where the poet Ellen Renton performed. Is poetry a big influence for you?
Absolutely, in fact, I enjoy all the other art forms more than music: poetry, written words, sculpture, painting, photography. They inspire my musical work more than other composers or even pieces of music. Of course, music and pieces of music and peers and living and dead composers do, but actually it’s people like Ellen Renton and George Mackay Brown.
There’s a great moment in the documentary made about Carve the Runes, when you’re listening to the album for the first time since it’s been recovered, and you’re thrilled that so much of it is intact. What was that moment like for you?
It’s an experience I don’t think will happen again, because I won’t necessarily do it like that. And it was like dancing with ghosts of memory. It was like hearing your voice on the tape from 30 years ago; it sounded like a different person. I was met with all these ideas that I’d forgotten, coupled with the sense of occasion that it had survived against all odds. So now, it acts as a sort of resilient message to the arts. You know, we can take a battering but we’ll always keep going.
You recently performed music from the album at Stonehenge. What are the other plans for the album?
We did the premiere in London – 2000 people turned out in this bold leap of faith, not knowing what was going to be on the tape. At that point, nobody knew but me, my soloists and my ensemble, and we performed, and it was such a wild experience that I can’t reproduce. I’m going on tour in November. I’m going to the US, Europe and then back to the UK, and I’m going to just share all the stories and melody from this project with an incredible smaller ensemble. There’s so much power in chamber music; doesn’t matter the size.
What’s your composition process?
Not an easy question, but the truth is, it’s different every time. I work very early, so 6am – 10am is mostly when I get the writing bits done. I think it’s more akin to maybe a writer, an author – I just write. I try not to concern myself with what I’m writing, how I’m writing, how good or shit it is. So, it’s constantly moving and being edited, moving forward, backwards, forwards, backwards.
I have sort of an archive. I call it my ‘orphanage of sound’, and I go in the folders, and then when I’m lost – which is very rarely – if I want something or I’m just browsing, I’ll go into that orphanage and I’ll pull something out, and it always finds a home. It means I’m never staring at a blank page, ever, which means – thankfully – I’ve not experienced writer’s block or procrastination. I just crack on.
Erland Cooper is performing at Saint Luke’s in Glasgow on 25th November. Tickets here.
Main Photo Credit: Samuel Davies
