Tiny Leaves – ‘With the Hollow at My Feet’ from ‘Mynd’

The landscape of the Long Mynd first came to my attention courtesy of Malcolm Saville and his Lone Pine adventure series of books. I have written before about how my very belated discovery of Saville and the Lone Pine books might have been due to a strange England/Scotland divide enforced during my formative years, but in some respects I am rather pleased to have come to them, and him, in my fifties. Had I read the books as a youngster, I wonder if the draw of the specific landscapes would have been so appealing as they are now, or would they have skimmed over my head as simply a setting for the adventures of children I may have longed to be? It’s a moot point of course, but regardless, I am pleased that Saville’s landscapes of the Mynd were already recently fixed in my own, ahem, mind, when I came across the tremendous audio exploration of place released in 2023 by Joel Pike, aka Tiny Leaves.

Emerging from an artist-in-residency week at the National Trust’s Cardingmill Valley site in 2021, ‘Mynd’ is a meditative narrative through the landscape with a deep connection to nature. As example, Pike harvested sounds from the conductivity in the leaves of trees to his synthesiser and subsequently discovered that Alder Trees communicate via their roots through a sonic frequency that corresponds to the note A3 on piano.

Now I admit that I struggle sometimes with conceptual music that does too little or too much with field recordings. It is, it seems to me, a damnably tricky balancing act to carry off. Pike errs on the side of caution which, to an admitted audiological ignoramus such as myself, is doubtless For The Best. For the entirety of its 41 minutes and 41 seconds the record subtly interprets the sounds of the landscape with delicate gestures of eloquent decoration. This balancing act is perhaps best captured on the exquisite shimmer of ‘With The Hollow At My Feet’. A five minute meditation on the pause during motion, it is the aural equivalent of a Dorothy Wordsworth diary entry, a breath of warm air and the glimpse of harebells dancing in the breeze. One suspects that Malcolm Saville would wholeheartedly approve.