The One Two Bird And The Half Horse

SOMEWHERE INSIDE the beginnings of a leaf in a forest far away from things, lays cocooned a memory of a song not yet born. If you lean a gentle ear close enough, you might hear her name spoken. Orla Wren is a dream child, a smile before sleep, an old lullaby, an ache in the space between. And my Tui knows Orla Wren best of all.

I have waited a long while to tell you about his incredible creation, this work that has taken him in and out of quite some years, and now I can. The One Two Bird And The Half Horse is here.
I have watched over two years as these most intricate of outpourings grew. As Tui made and remade these twelve beautiful sound sculptures with infinite care, I learnt that his craft is like mine, but the hairs of his paintbrushes are the most delicate of violin notes, and his paint is birdsong, netted from the bedroom window at dawn. I have never known anyone so heartfelt about the work he does. And it is this heart-feeling that he weaves amongst the melodies he makes with many strange and wonderful instruments. There are zithers and whistles and bells and fiddles and erhus and Uzbek changs and fence-twangs and melodicas and accordions and beautiful voices from Georgia and Japan and France and Scotland and birds and clarinets and cellos and creaky chairs and sewing machines and flugel horns and Tibetan singing bowls and pianos and music boxes and children's songs. And all of these are taken like threads on a laptop-loom and woven, with a quite extraordinary ear for detail together.

Tui is often asked what kind of music he makes, and this is an almost impossible question to answer. For him nature is his cello string, whether it be to record the rain on the tin roof of an abandoned house, or place a microphone close by the pebbles shifting at the sea's edge. Together with these collected voices of wild instruments he weaves into a precisely chosen part of the tapestry small lines of melody, sometimes played by him, and sometimes imagined by him but sung in imaginary words by others. And then he listens, sometimes for days, inside the womb of the music, until he hears more chinks in the warp and weft, where he gently places a harmony made from electronically altered footsteps or the rustlings of something that could be moth wings. And then maybe he takes a whistle and plays just two more notes, long and barely there, and lays them, repeated like a playground song, two octaves away from where they started and bouncing from ear to ear, like a blanket over the whole music as if to tuck it into bed for the night.

The One Two Bird and The Half Horse is Tui's second album, and in his sphere (seemingly named "folktronica") Orla Wren is quietly rather successful. This beautiful work has received some eloquent and deserved praise already (a few here below), though it has only just been released, on the Japanese Flau label. I am enormously proud.

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It distils sublime wood smoke folk atmosphere and pointallist digitalis to the subatomic level, until it becomes effectively the same stuff that makes brooks babble and winds whisper. ~David Sheppard

A dream I would like to return to... ~Ben Eshmade

...these porcelain pirouettes are possessed and woven of a beautifully demurred tapestry that‘s all at once untamed and pure, not so much primitive but rather more natural, the melodies appear like daydreaming serenades, barely there, as though like flickering apparitions caught from the corner of the eye, willowy and fragile, partly hazy and blurred seemingly just out of focus, their free spirited timbres idyllically teased with an unreal arresting tenderness as they sway murmuring like woodland opines caught adrift upon a delicate breeze... ~The Sunday Experience

...au vu de la petite fille crayonnée qui sert de pochette, et à entendre la voix fébrile, haut perché, qui s’échappe des morceaux, vous allez penser qu’Orla Wren est une fragile petite fée, qui dépose ses disques discrètement sur le rebord de nos fenêtres... ~Delicious Scopitone

Les pattes craquantes des insectes s’occupent des percussions, tandis que les toiles d’araignées se tendent dans le vent pour vibrer doucement, harpes minuscules. ~Delicious Scopitone

... achingly lovely ... ~Boomkat

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I have been enormously privileged to see inside the making of such unique music.
And even more so to have my scratchy pencil drawings adorn the album sleeve, my flute and clarinet and accordion meanderings to be mixed into the music and be asked to tell an animated story around one of the tracks.
For many months I sat crouched in our Scottish attic moving tiny pieces of paper underneath a camera to tell the pencil-drawn tale of The Fish and The Doll. And here it is at long last.

There is another film on the album too... made by Tui from little snippets of film of my family and me when I was just five. These he has made black and white and layered with old photographs, and exploiting my Dad's original wobbly video camera technique, he has created a glimpsed evocation of childhood, half remembered, and half longed-for. The First Born Daughter of Water.

Both of these films are for tracks featuring the amazing vocals of Georgia born Russudan Meipariani. We do hope you like them.




Tui sees the world in a very beautiful way. Like me he always notices the outsider, the one who is innocent or old, who has known madness or has lines of sad experience etched around her eyes. Those who long to hold hands with these folk will hear what Tui is trying to say in his music. Orla Wren is for these people and about these people, and if you are one of them it is for you.
These songs are fragments of a yearning with no name. They will evoke in you a childhood, down amongst the grass blades, where it was once possible to find sunlight floating in a puddle and make stories for all tomorrow's mayflies.
The songs' names are as beautiful as their sounds, and you must listen to them alone, sitting by a tree or at the edge of a hill. Put the music right into your ears so that you can hear every lilt and scuttle, so that you can find that place in you where your tears began.








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Here are some places where Orla Wren can be found...

orlawren.com
orla wren on myspace
orla wren at flau
You can buy the album from cargo records here
sideways through sound (A psychedelic reverie of a radio station half way round the world who made The One Two Bird And The Half Horse the featured album on the show a few weeks ago.)
orla wren blog
orla wren at expanding records (the home of his acclaimed debut album Butterfly Wings Make)
& on street corners and village greens of Europe playing wonkily handmade instruments alongside my yet-to-be-made puppet theatre...

The lovely delicate photographs of frosty leaf, downy seed-head, foggy trees and moth-cocoon are Tui's too :)

Tales of third eyes, injector pipes, duck eggs, childrens' drawings, and some other lovely things...

THIS IS A SNIPPET OF A JUST BEGUN PAINTING of a white-haired owl-riding lady pointing at a place on her forehead where some believe we have a third eye for seeing Other Things. She has been taking shape in between a rather patchworky few days, and is the sixth painting in the chakra series. I don't know if third eyes are meant to foresee things, but if they are, I wonder if her third eye foresaw that we would be hobbling along the road with a leaking injector pipe just the day after having escaped from our two week sojourn in the garage. We have spent rather a scary amount of hundreds on the recent works that have been administered underneath our house... and had just enough left to afford diesel for a trip to Ikea to stock up on frames for the next weekend selling... and we drove along the road yippeeing to each other that we were free of the industrial estate and actually driving along again.

The joy was short-lived however as on the journey home there followed stalling and horrendous smoking of exhaust and juddering aplenty. We somehow managed to hobble back to our forest spot, Tui expertly manoeuvring our house down the narrow dark country lanes without letting his foot off the accelerator as it would stall if he did. A late night look under the engine hood revealed an engine covered in leaked diesel from a tiny crack in the injector pipe... this had probably been egged on by the recent fossickings under there, and is hopefully not actually such a major disaster as we had thought, we'll just need to get a new pipe made.. and these woods are the most best of all places to be stranded! We'll have a perfect excuse should the council decide to come down and point out the no overnight parking sign to us.

In recent days we have enjoyed a lovely lunch with my family who visited and brought post that had been accumulating on their doormat for me. A house that moves has no address obviously and so for certain things I have been using mum and dad's whist we are about. We also use the Poste Restante service offered (not always smilingly) at post offices. Anyhow, I had parcels from lovely blog readers across the ocean.. and I was delighted first of all by these wonderful drawings of a driving house (with rather apt exhaust cloud!) and one of Baba Yaga's house by the talented children of Anthromama to whom I send big thanks for posting me these delightful works. Also parceled up beautifully was a box of "Rotating Fez Magical Harissa Spice Mix" and a wooden figurine along with kind and interesting words from Joseph Yarrow whose wonderful medieval-slavic-hermetic-norse tale The Goose Grail I urge you to investigate. I was also excited to receive a recently ordered book A Year At My Back Door by my blog friend Ciara, whose beautiful photographs of her view of the Sugar Loaf mountain in Wicklow Ireland through the changing year have been put together in a very lovely little book indeed.


Tui, in between stoically chopping wood for the fire, has been quietly preparing for April when his much awaited and very beautiful second Orla Wren album will be offered to the world. We excitedly peeped in WHSmiths at the latest copy of The Wire magazine where there is this month a fine looking and enticing advert for The One Two Bird And The Half Horse with spidery drawings by me. Soon I shall be telling you more about this wonderful work and showing you animations and films...



Right now, we are parked in this lovely wood where owls hoot by night and woodpeckers peck by day. We have had such happy days amongst the trees and it almost doesn't matter that we chugged here. People have been so friendly, and we have even been brought freshly laid duck eggs (thank you Sue!) which we had on toast and which were of the delicateist duck egg blue you've ever seen. And today, Sunday, the busiest day here, we decided after being asked if we wanted to sell a painting by a friendly visitor, to set up a gallery-in-the-woods on the side of our truck. It attracted interested browsers and two much appreciated sales...

So there you have it.. our patchwork of news for these last few days. Some days are wonderful, some days are stressful... much like anyone else's life really. But we are happily living the life we've chosen. Many people tell us we are brave, but we are not really. We have the same fears and dreams that all folk have.. and sometimes we fly and sometimes we sink. The important thing for me I think is that I am not imagining some other time when I might do this thing I dream of. I'm doing it now, and for all its hooting owls and cracked injector pipes, it is beautiful.
We plan to stay in the woods for a while and then providing there are no more mechanical disasters we will begin to head up to East Anglia where I will be taking part in an exhibition, and where our patchwork journey will continue....

Orla Wren Films

ORLA WREN as you may or may not know is the name of the beautiful music that Tui makes.
Indeed, his second album, The One Two Bird And The Half Horse, the making of which took him through two years, around tender sounds, over hoorays and in and out of sorrows, is now complete and ready to whisper into ears far and near, and an astonishingly beautifully crafted creation it is. I am full of admiration for this work that I have seen in its birthing, and I will write more about this one day soon when this music is available to be heard, and glad the world's ears will be then.

In the meantime... we are making films for the music. My cut-out wonky-handmade stop-frame animation will be for one track - The Fish & The Doll, and it is emerging slowly up in the animation attic day by day. Another film is just about ready, made by Tui for the last track The First Born Daughter of Water from little pieces of film from my childhood.

Here you can see some tiny snippets of stills from the first scenes of the animation and stills from Tui's film where layers of inklings of glimpses of my younger days are merged delicately to compliment the music.

We would like to ask if any folks out there might have some old footage that they would be happy to send us to be used in a similar way. A unique collection of hints of people's stories would be woven together to make a wonderful film or two to go hand in hand with this music. Please drop a word to orlawren@gmail.com if you can help. Thanks muchly.

Some brown parcel tape & the beginnings of a tale ...

THE orla wren animation is begun!
The story is gently beginning to tell itself with pencil drawings that will be moved very small distances, remote shorelines and, of course, beautiful music in the autumn of its completion.
I have rigged up the most Heath-Robinsonian affair ever known which is supposed to be an animation studio .. this involves a video camera attached with brown parcel tape to some bits of damp kindling that never made it to the fire, which are screwed together and clamped to an old Singer sewing machine table flap... with bits of cardboard box between the clamp jaws to protect it. The lighting consists of an Ikea lamp balanced on a wooden stool balanced on some breadboards balanced on a box of drawing equipment. And the imagery is taped onto the top of a low shelf and encircled with shiny white card to bounce light back onto the scene.

I am using different stop frame animation software this time ~ Animator DV ~ which is designed for use with digital video cameras. We have managed to set the camera up so that it just "sees" the scene under the lens and then I can use the program to grab stills. Goodness knows whether I will be able to get to grips with it. Today there have been many grittings-of-teeth-ings whilst trying to animate the most minuscule paper character, as well as trippings-over-of-wirings and breakings-of-lampings and a little bit of cursing!

My last (and first!) animation was a rougher beast with characters and scenery painted onto cardboard.. and a tight deadline to work to. This time I am drawing the tale with a very fine pencil and the piece will be slower moving in subtle colours and with tender sounds.

After many thousands of frames and a good few months you will see and hear the delightful result!

I must be the luckiest of animators to be sat in the room animating to a beautiful track whilst it is being created. This ~ The Fish and The Doll ~ will become the first track of the new orla wren album ~ to be released later this year.

The Woods

TODAY'S TALE TAKES US INTO THE WOODS where things are not quite what they seem, where children get lost and maybe never found again and where the trees alone are witness ...
I have always loved the combination of music and strange imagery which has sparked my long interest in animation and all things puppety.
Stop frame animation holds a particular charm for me in its wonky darkness, its dark wonkyness; especially the masterful works by animators from Eastern Europe like Yuriy Norsteyn and Jan Svankmajer.
Thus inspired I took up the challenge of making a cut-out stop motion animated video for Polly Paulusma's single "The Woods" released earlier this year on One Little Indian records from her latest album, "Fingers & Thumbs".

Below is the result .. a five-and-a-half minute extravaganza of cardboard legs, wire butterflies and many painted backgrounds; each piece moved tiny bit by tiny bit ... at 24 frames-per-second ... which actually means that I made between 8000 and 9000 single captured images for the whole video.
It was a labour of love and I learned a lot as I went along .. It is filmed with a fairly high res webcam and the characters and sets are laid on layers of glass ( a trick I learned from reading about how Mr Norsteyn works )
Polly's lyrics inspired the forest-as-witness-to-a-dark-happening story ... which calls to mind a rather less than sugary Hansel & Gretel tale and conjures imagined fears of the archetypal forest as well as a real horror of a terrifying bogeyman, in more tangible guises. It speaks too of the turning of the year ...
I am pleased to say that it was received with smiles and kind words and even got played on MTV in Italy! And I must add that I would never have made it to the end if it weren't for the patience and brain of my kind brother.
It was my first ever animation .. but not my last!
I will be making a new and quite different and gentle-beautiful animation for the new Orla Wren album due out next year ...

Click here to see the video if you are having trouble viewing it.

Move-click-move-click-move-click-move-click ...