Things That Vanish

Garefowl is an international collective rooted in the story of St Kilda’s last Great Auk. Conceived by Ewan Macdonald and his father Murdo, relatives of one of the men who killed the last Garefowl, the project reflects on that family history through music.

On Things That Vanish, recorded at night on Hirta, St Kilda’s winds, waves, birds and the eerie thrum of the snipe move through every track. Nathan Bontrager, Stuart Graham, Chris Jones, Ewan Macdonald, Richard O’Flynn and Jess Whelligan draw on St Kilda folk traditions and tales of threatened seabirds.

No synthesizers were used. Instead, the record is built from sampled and processed field and hydrophone recordings made on St Kilda. Drones come from a process developed by Richard O’Flynn and Joe Gardner, mapping X-ray diffraction spectra from rock or bone samples into sine wave drones.