Chamber Cairn

Recorded across two days deep in the Cumbrian landscape, and written, performed and produced by Jack McNeill on clarinet and bass clarinet, Chamber Cairn conjures extraordinary tones and near-drones, tunes springing up between them like wildflowers. The four longer tracks – ‘Scree’, ‘Air Song’, ‘Buzzard’ and (mystifying for a Cumbrian deep dive) ‘Zurich’ – are surrounded by shorter, ambient ‘Cairns’, improvisations using sound tables made from olive ash by a local woodworker, as well as stones and whistles. Cairns are for the dead of our deep past, still with us as sentinels in contemporary landscape and culture, and it’s this mix of subterranean, ancient, airborne and ever-present, all set within the enormous eco-embrace of the Cumbrian landscape, that sets this album out as an absorbing instrumental set of invention, immersion, imagination and recreation. It’s a short set that grows in stature. And it may be that the otherworldly airs of the five ‘Cairns’ are the stand-out points.