The Living Mountain

Jenny Sturgeon is quite the renaissance woman. The Aberdeenshirebased singer-songwriter has a PhD in seabird ecology and as well as performing in Scottish folk group Salt House and the audio-visual project Northern Flyway, she organises the Shetland Songwriting Festival and runs her own cottage industry, Ink & Wool. For this, her second full-length solo album, she has created a song cycle exploring her personal connection to the Cairngorms mountain range and drawing on the work of the late nature writer Nan Shepherd. Two tracks, ‘Water’ and ‘Man’, set Shepherd’s words to simple melodies, the remainder being Sturgeon’s own writing, except for ‘The Senses’, which was co-written with her mother, Annie.

Sturgeon sings in a gentle, sleepy voice, clearly enunciating her sometimes percussive, sometimes alliterative lyrics over variously fingerpicked guitar patterns and plangent piano accompaniments, carefully augmented by strings, harmonium, whistle, synth and field recordings. The rhythmical use of these ‘found sounds’ is most effective on ‘Frost and Snow’ with its buoyant tunefulness, while ‘The Group’ tolls effective single words as it depicts time passing from the mountain’s perspective.