The Ian McMillan Orchestra

Homing Review in SONGLINES World Music Magazine. 

http://www.songlines.co.uk/

The Ian McMillan Orchestra

Homing In

Taith RecordsTRCD00012

60 mins

****

Homing In is the second album by the poet Ian McMillan and his Orchestra, five musicians led by accordion player Luke Carver Goss, who composes most of the music. But this is not the simple recitation of verse to music. Not at all. McMillan’s words and his delivery of them make him an instrument as much as Clare Salaman’s nyckelharpa or Nathan Riki Thomson’s double bass, which evocatively accompanies ‘First Gig’. In this memoir McMillan’s first band entertains a jumble sale until the rector draws the curtain on their performance, and his career as a drummer. He now plays percussion on the language, using all its resources of meaning, melody and rhythm.

The Orchestra is homing in, but ranging widely on the flight. ‘Ten Forgotten Moments of History’ is a chronicle of events that didn’t happen, perhaps should have, or that we just didn’t notice, such as “The moment just before Neil Armstrong stepped/Onto the Moon”. In ‘Song of Stanage Edge’, an elegy for his father, McMillan is softly stroking the drum-skin of language with a brush. But ‘And the Word Was Music’ is a joyous series of linguistic cymbal crashes. There is great wit, too, ‘iPod’ recreates vocally the torturing “chikka chikka ka chikka” leaking from the iPod a few seats away, in a rap that somehow celebrates what it attacks. 

A range of instruments - fiddles, guitars, a hurdy-gurdy - and spoken and sung vocals all combine to create something that isn’t simply music, nor poetry, but a realisation of the potential of both, freed from the straitening conventions of their usual forms and our expectations.

Julian May