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| Blair Coron |
Blair Coron is a musician and poet from Springfield, a small village in Fife, Scotland. His quiet and intimate music blends modern classical, storytelling and traditional melodies, with themes of nature, people, time and place. I featured his 2023 project, A Carrying Stream [see article], which consisted of a collection of music and accompanying exhibition. For his new project, Woven Ground, he has taken the music out into the landscape and created a film out of the process.
Woven Ground is an EP featuring Blair Coron – piano, harmonium, vocals, guitar; Charlie Stewart – fiddle; Miwa Nagato-Apthorp – vocals; Zoe Bestel – vocals, with four tracks: Isle of Canna, Midsummer, 5:54am, 2026, Sgùrr A’ Mhaoraich, Beneath Six Black Poplar Trees and Moon Lament. The accompanying film, which is available on YouTube, features the creation of these four.
Blair Coron is a poet as well as a musician and amongst his forthcoming projects is the publication of his first book of poetry. This comes out in the film which is part travelogue, part musical exploration and part poetic meditation, filmed by Slaiste Kaniute. Coron’s music and words suffuse the film, so that it becomes far more than a ‘making of’ type film.
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| Blair Coron at Margaret Fay Shaw’s piano on the Isle of Canna |
The first part takes place on the Isle of Canna, the westernmost of the Small Isles archipelago, in the Scottish Inner Hebrides. The islands were left to the National Trust for Scotland by their previous owners, the highly important Celtic studies scholars John Lorne Campbell (1906-1996) and his wife Margaret Fay Shaw, and one of Coron’s previous projects featured Campbell’s recording of birdsong made on Canna in the 1950s. A feature of Woven Ground is Coron’s intention not only to record in situ but to include the sound of the surrounding landscape and birds, so his recording on Canna came 75 years after that original birdsong recording. And Coron’s piece, Isle of Canna, Midsummer, 5:54am is recorded on Margaret’s piano. We learn the background to the isle and this helps to set off Coron’s atmospheric piece.
Next comes a travelogue involving moving a harmonium to Kinloch Hourn (the name comes from the Gaelic, Ceann Loch Shubhairne, for “the head of Loch Hourn”.) with fiddle player Charlie Stewart. There we see and hear the two performing Sgùrr A’ Mhaoraich (the name of a Scottish mountain which is viewed from Kinloch Hourn). The recording, done in the wild, is wonderfully atmospheric and again the film succeeds in being poetically contemplative rather that just a film.
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| Recording at Kinloch Hourn |
Rather more artful is the section with Coron in a garden writing a poem, Beneath Six Black Poplar Trees, which develops into a piece involving voice and electronics as the film turns artful with a sequence where the film flow is reversed so flowers seem to be created not destroyed.
The final section involves the four musicians and sound recordist gathering in a glade in the Trossachs forest to play Moon Lament. This is a folksong where Coron (on voice and guitar) is accompanied by Charlie Stewart (fiddle), Zoë Bestel and Miwa Nagato- Apthorp (vocals), with the sound of the wind blowing through the branches and creaking of tree tops overhead.
Blair Coron’s Woven Ground is available on BandCamp and the full film is on YouTube.
