CD
This is a recording of 'Around Here, The Birds Plant The Trees' as it existed on Friday 12 December 2025. I mention a specific date, because the score for this work is constantly shifting and provides a new variation each time it is played, echoing the cyclical nature of the things that inspired it.
This piece began as I stood in my front field at dawn, listening to calls of a lone blackbird. The sun had just popped up from the horizon and was covering all of the hedgerows in a brilliance of golds and pinks as it roused the world alive. But my thoughts....my thoughts were stuck on destruction. The reason for this was that in the neighbouring fields, all to the west and all to the south, as far as my eye could see, was the aftermath of a monoculture commercial forest clearfell: a landscape decimated by greed into ecological chaos. I had been commissioned to write a new piece of music in which I was asked to reflect on 'The Current Climate' and the mess at which I stared was going to be my inspiration. I planned to write about the climate that had been left behind by my absentee neighbour: the commercial forestry Goliath who had systematically annihilated the surrounding 50 hectares of land that had previously been the home to a wide ecosystem. I thought to myself, 'I'll write something to equal the harsh cacophony of the harvesting machines as they shred the nests of fledgling buzzards; to evoke the rumbling shaking noise I'd hear in bed at night as they crashed the huge trees they'd cut to the ground; and to mirror the aching sound of my heartbeat as I'd awaken in the morning to witness the obliteration of hedgerows and wild spaces that had been home to everything from clusters of mushrooms to generations of red squirrels.' But these sparks of thoughts for the composition kept getting interrupted by the increasingly insistent calls from the blackbird. It was hopping around the branches of a hawthorn tree, acting like it owned the place. Which....well.... which it did. Alongside the robins and the starlings and the foxes and the shrews. And then, something in the immediacy of that blackbird's call, made me realise that I had wasted enough of my thoughts on the forestry company and maybe it was time to fill my brain with something new. Maybe it was time to celebrate the potentials for the spaces that their clearfell had left behind where wildlife might dwell once again. I stopped hearing the sounds that had once been and began to focus on the sounds that were around me in that moment. I thought about personal stewardship, natural agency, industrial impact and the rewilding acts of the wild itself. Then, I remembered a conversation I'd had with a farmer friend about how birds are the architects of the living landscape and from there 'Around Here, The Birds Plant The Trees' came alive.
When the time came to bring together an ensemble to develop this work, I choose close friends that I knew would happily start the process of making music not with instruments in hand but instead by standing beside me in a field; taking in the rustle of hedgerows, the whisper of the wind through stumps and saplings, the calls of birds shaping the landscape and the sounds of the spaces in between. From this shared act of listening, we began to collaboratively write the composition, rooted in the textures and rhythms of the field, each note and pause evoking the rhythms of growth and regeneration. The rustle of beetles in the hedgerow, the squeak of a leaning Sitka spruce, a lone curlew’s call, our own breathing and beating and rustling as we stood there — these became the pulse and melody of the music.
It is thanks to Ailbhe, Eimear, Tola, Ultan and Willie that this work emerged as it did and it is thanks to them that the piece keeps evolving.
The original incarnation of this work was co-commissioned by hcmf// and New Music Dublin.
A portion of proceeds from the sale of this album will go to 'Save Leitrim,' a voluntary organisation that works to stand up to the commercial forestry industry and the government policies that enable its gluttonous industrial chaos. Save Leitrim highlights the detrimental effects of our current forestry policies on communities, wildlife, nature, water quality, farming, mental well being and common sense.
Good forestry practices can exist and do exist in many other places. If you'd like to learn more about their possibilities, I highly recommend reading the essay 'Economies of Scale? by Wendell Berry.
'A good forest economy, like any other good land-based economy, would aim to join the local human community and the local natural community or ecosystem together as conservingly and as healthfully as possible.' - Wendall Berry
