Waillee Waillee

Released in 1978, Waillee Waillee is the second full-length album from Dorothy Carter, composer, Mediæval Bæbes founder and master of the dulcimer, zither and psaltery. The record saw Carter exploring early and medieval music from across the continents through her own idiosyncratic style of experimentation. 45 years later, the album is getting a renaissance thanks to New York experimental label Palto Flats and Berlin’s Putojefe Records. The release comes with lovingly compiled liner notes featuring contributions from family, close friends and collaborators, including Laraaji and Alexander Hacke of German industrial outfit Einstürzende Neubauten.

While experimental in style, Waillee Waillee holds a deep knowledge of and respect for the traditions it breaks with. Opener ‘The Squirrel is a Funny Thing…’ turns a whimsical US folk song into a sinister cut, full of tremulous strings and Carter’s mercurial vocals shapeshifting between childlike sing-song and witch’s hex.

Carter was a keen Celtic music historian, starting her love affair with strings as a student of the Irish harp before picking up the psaltery in the early 1960s. Her studies took her to music schools in London and Paris, and she read widely on the history of Celtic music and its techniques. Composed of three separate melodies, ‘Celtic Medley’ runs from the upbeat tinkling of Turlough O’Carolan’s classic waltz, ‘Planxty Irwin’, played clear as a bell, through the yearning minor key change of Irish air, ‘South Winds’ and into the melancholic drones of Scottish border ballad ‘The Lonely Glens Of Yarrow’, borne along by a wash of reverberation and harmonic resonance.

It should be noted that Carter was far from quiet and bookish. Her international escapades featured psychedelic investigations in Maine, deckhanding on a Mississippi steamboat and religious visions with an anarchist monk in northern Mexico. Her adventures would eventually lead her into the path of Robert Rutman, one of her most prolific collaborators, who’s invention, the steel cello, underpins many of the songs on Waillee Waillee. On ‘Summer Rhapsody’, the elephantine drone of Rutman’s instrument provides the trellis around which Carter’s melodies coil, blossoming from pattering plinks to loops of complex fingerwork. On ‘Tree of Life’, the cello appears almost horn-like, announcing the arrival of Carter’s honeyed scales and sylph-like vocals.

Her remarkable life aside, it is Carter’s power and precision on her instruments that is her most prevailing legacy. Her virtuoso talent matched with her curiosity for tradition and her desire to play and experiment with her practice, make this a record perplexing and pleasurable in equal measure. As her daughter, Celeste, writes in the liner notes, ‘music was her true passion and everyone who heard it knew it. Take time to see beauty and enjoy Dorothy’s music.’