Caochan

Caochan is a meditation on landscape and temporality through a deep-time lens. Scottish composer Joshua Sabin imagines both as fluid, porous terrains where matter and perception merge, are annihilated and resurface anew.

At the heart of the album are five poems by Scottish modernist writer and poet Nan Shepherd (1893–1981). Sabin translates each into music through a text-setting process where every change in note corresponds to each syllable, and melodic phrasing follows the cadence and rhythm of the spoken word.

Sabin performs and records bowed cymbals, chimes, cello, chanter, pedal organ, concertina, low-D whistle, bass drum, bodhran, saxophone and rocks, reforming them into layered sonic gestures and hybrid timbres. Poems include Real Presence, Underground, Achiltibuie, Singing Burn and Summit of Corrie Etchachan. Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is regarded as a landmark book on the natural world.