Hallival

Nominative determinism is at work here. Iona is a Hebridean island famed for its wild beauty, spirituality, and ancient stories. Iona Lane, born and brought up in Yorkshire, spent childhood holidays in the Scottish islands and the singer and guitarist’s first album is largely inspired by them, her songs drawing on their topography, mythology and geology – Hallival is a mountain in the isle of Rùm.

There is something of the wind in her singing and a salt tang to her music. It is rooted in folk – with Scottish musicians Lauren MacColl on fiddle and Rachel Newton on harp – but the synth of Sol Edwards and Jay Taylor’s field organ create a modernistic evocation of wind, tide and seabirds. Lane’s intense engagement with the environment is clear from the opening track ‘Western Tidal Swell’, and ‘Tipalt Burn’, which takes her south, to the stream running along Hadrian’s Wall. This was a commission for a ‘sound walk’ and Lane’s music, akin to Jenny Sturgeon’s (who makes an appearance) would be at home in an art installation, as well as on a folk festival stage. ‘Scenery is fine – but human nature is finer’ wrote John Keats, and like the poet Lane is drawn to people and their activities in these places. In ‘Schiehallion’ she writes, in a single song, about the mountain itself, the experiment in 1774 when scientists used it to calculate, for the first time, the density of the Earth, and the story of the party with locals afterwards, when the fiddler’s violin ignited (was it his spirited playing or just the spirit they were drinking?) and burned the bothy down.