Nalle: Wilder Shores of Love
CD/LP alt.vinyl AV019
Front cover

Nalle: Wilder Shores of Love
CD with 8 page booklet AV019
LP with insert, 180 gram vinyl
photo by alex woodward

Review in The Wire Magazine:

As with their 2006 debut, By Chance Upon Waking, and 2008’s The
Siren’s Wave, whether or not you enjoy Glasgow based trio Nalle’s
third album rests upon what you make of Hanna Tuulikki’s voice. If
early Kate Bush is too fey for you, Joanna Newsom too childlike, then
proceed with caution. If, on the other hand, you’ve always wanted to
hear the Incredible String Band’s Licorice McKechnie really letting
rip, then look no further.
Across these seven tracks, Tuulikki adopts different personae to act
out variations on the mythic themes of love and death that have
informed British indigenous music for centuries. Accompanied by multi-
instrumentalist Chris Hladowski (with whom she also performs in The
Family Elan) and viola player Aby Vulliamy, Tuulikki constructs
poetic, timeless tales with arrangements that draw as much on 1960s
acid folk and its 21st  century descendants as they do on traditional
music. In the ballad “Sunne’s Return” her longing for physical
dissolution, coupled with Hladowski’s spidery, off-key electric
guitar, creates something as creepy and haunted as an empty
playground swing rocking by itself. “Lilly” is a dark vision of
extinction and exile built around a heavy, Comus-like acoustic riff
and hotwired with a spitting fuzz-guitar solo, in a similar vein to
some of Ben Chasny’s louder Six Organs Of Admittance moments.
The stand-out track, “Songthrush” – which also features Scottish
saxophonist Raymond McDonald and Alex Nielsen on drums, reprising the
free jazz inflected playing that powered his own psych folk song
project, Directing Hand – is a broiling, formless freak-out, borne
aloft on Tuulikki’s ecstatic, birdlike trilling. It’s a breathtaking
burst of magical energy, and easily some of the most convincing free-
folk the UK has ever produced.
Daniel Spicer, July 2010

Hanna heads for music’s wilder shores

Neil Cooper

22 Jul 2010

Hanna Tuulikki didn’t have the confidence to sing when she was growing up in Brighton.

The local indie boys with guitars hated her voice, and it was only when Tuulikki moved to Glasgow School of Art to study environmental art that she sang in public. Even then it was only after she was persuaded to go to open mic nights at Nice’n’ Sleazy’s, the Sauchiehall Street venue a stone’s throw faway from where she was studying.

Several years on, and the half-English, half-Finnish artist and singer has just released Wilder Shores of Love, her third album with Nalle, the trio she formed in 2004 with viola player Aby Vulliamy and multi-instrumentalist Chris Hladowski.

An accompanying exhibition of Tuulikki’s artwork, inspired by the new album’s seven songs of love and death, is currently running in the upstairs gallery of the wonderful Welcome Home emporium in Partick.

Tuulikki can also be heard in Stackwalker, a filmed study of west of Scotland crofting communities and East European migrant workers that forms part of Fields, Factories and Workshops, a new exhibition by Simon Yuill at the Centre of Contemporary Arts in Glasgow.

On top of all this activity, a stripped-down version of Nalle (it means little bear in Finnish) will end a small British tour on home turf tonight, again at the CCA. Support acts will be The One Ensemble and Two Wings, both of whom Tuulikki sings with. Two Wings will also play alongside Alasdair Roberts at a screening of a documentary film about the late American folk musician Sandy Bull. All of which suggests that the boys back home in Brighton might just have got things wrong.

Not that Tuulikki’s oeuvre would ever have much fitted in with the indie crowd. On the new Nalle album, as with the previous two, By Chance Upon Waking and The Siren’s Call, Vulliamy, Hladowski and a host of Glasgow guests, including saxophonist Raymond McDonald and drummer Alex Neilson, wrap a mélange of east European, Nordic, Asian and free jazz influences around Tuulikki’s voice.

The latter is a remarkably emotive high-pitched instrument that swoops and keens like some spectral missing link between Kate Bush and Joanna Newsom. Just to make things even more singular, the seven songs of love and death that make up Wilder Shores of Love are inspired by the ancient Greek myth of doomed lovers Hero and Leander.

“The songs were written during quite a difficult period,” Tuulikki admits. “I originally thought it was going to be a solo album, and the first recordings were just myself and a resonator.

“In terms of songwriting, I became interested in trying to transform a quite painful thing into some kind of resolution, using song to find resolution in my own life, but taking on different personas in the songs, and playing with recurring motifs in the way traditional English folk songs do.

“The idea of the sun and the moon meeting in the sky, for instance, in traditional folk songs means that it’s such a rare occurrence that it’s never going to happen.”

A major impetus for the album came in 2008 when Tuulikki was in London for her first ever solo show at left-field music venue Café Oto. While there she visited an exhibition at Tate Modern by American artist Cy Twombly.

His 1985 painting, Wilder Shores of Love (Bassano in Teverina), not only gifted Tuulikki an album title, but set her off on researching the Hero and Leander story, which had first inspired Twombly.

“I already had one or two of the songs that ended up on the album,” Tuulikki says, “and there just seemed to be some parallels in the exhibition with what I was going through.”

Produced by BBC Radio Scotland sonic alchemist John Cavanagh, Wilder Shores of Love introduces more textures to Nalle’s sound. Tuulikki’s partner in Two Wings Ben Reynolds introduces an Appalachian feel via his harmonica, while Tuulikki plays slide guitar and Vulliamy pounds a grand piano to considerable dramatic effect.

On the road things are sparer. With Hladowski currently indisposed, Reynolds adds lap steel guitar to a sound that now includes a recently acquired musical saw.

“It’s very ocean-like,” Tuulikki chuckles. “Last night the sound man said he felt like he was in the Pacific.”

As an artist, Tuulikki has frequently applied her unique voice to her practice in projects that have seen her replicate both the sound of the sea and a dawn chorus, had her sing and play clarinet to birds in a wildfowl sanctuary and lead song projects with communities in Glasgow and Liverpool.

Doing something as prosaic as hanging her beautifully arcane illustrations on a wall alongside a cabinet of limited edition bespoke album covers may sound conventional by comparison, but in terms of Wilder Shores of Love, it fits.

“This album feels like it’s the most image led,” Tuulikki observes. “When I was writing it, I could see all these images and motifs and this theme of light that goes way back to the first album.

“I wanted to concentrate all that into one image per song that then work together as a narrative whole. Doing the booklet for the album is one thing, but putting it all on a wall creates a world.”

Tuulikki reflects a moment. “I guess it’s my own world,” she says.

Nalle play CCA, Glasgow, tonight. The Wilder Shores of Love exhibition is at Welcome Home, Keith Street, Glasgow until July 31. Two Wings play with Alasdair Roberts at a screening of No Deposit, No Return Blues, CCA, Glasgow, August 13. Hanna Tuulikki will perform with Aby Vulliamy and Lucy Duncombe as part of Fields, Factories and Workshops, CCA, Glasgow, September 16. Wilder Shores of Love the album is available now.

The Herald

Welcome Home presents…
Wilder Shores of Love
Hanna Tuulikki

Preview with live music, Saturday 10 July 2010, 3 -7pm.

11 July – 1 August 2010

An exhibition of album artwork and unique edition of LPs by artist, vocalist, songwriter and multi instrumentalist Hanna Tuulikki, to launch the forthcoming album and UK tour by Nalle. The cover art plays an important role in the overall experience of the album, connecting and bringing to life the imagery and symbolism in the lyrics. Each song fits together with a drawing, building a portrait of personal experiences.

All artwork, LPs and CDs will be available to buy from Welcome Home.

Location: 19 Keith Street , Glasgow , G11 6QQ . For more information contact: 0141 334 9598 or

www.welcomehomestore.co.uk

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The exhibition:
(photos: Alex Woodward)

The cabinet with albums and prints

Framed drawings and hand made LPs

Framed drawings and silkscreened LP

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Preview, 10th July 2010

(photos: David Sams)

(photos: Suzy Glass)

Wilder Shores of Love

Thursday 15 July 2010

wilder shores of love shop now online

Wednesday 14 July 2010

Nalle: Wilder Shores of Love: CD/LP album

Hanna heads for music’s wilder shores

Neil Cooper

Wilder Shores of Love: art Exhibition...

Wilder Shores of Love: album artwork...

Wilder Shores of Love: Art Edition LPS....

Prints also available....