Hen Ogledd

Free Humans Hen Ogledd

Following on from the quartet's previous album Mogic, with its digital overtones and themes of artificial intelligence, Free Humans takes a deliberately organic and natural approach. Inspired as much by ABBA as the work of 12th century mystic-composer-naturalist-visionary Hildegard von Bingen, touched equally by the spirits of radical philosophical plumber Mary Midgley and PC Music star Hannah Diamond, as quiet as the paintings of Agnes Martin yet bombastic like a Werner Herzog documentary... it's an album of seamless, glorious contradictions. Tackling themes of love, friendship, Gaia theory, sewers, the nature of time, human stench, and the thrills of wild swimming, it's remarkable that, given the intense collision of influences and wide-ranging ideas at play, Free Humans somehow coheres into a marvellous whole.

Free Humans doesn't shy away from the fact humans are killing the earth, but it does it with spiky wit. Hen Ogledd manages to hold both the tragedy of the wrongs happening in the world and also a sense of hope and liberation in their hands at the same time.

Listen to it and you might just glimpse something like tree-consciousness. Listen to it and different layers and membranes and atmospheres will reveal themselves. This is not background music. It was made at a Lagrange point - the zone between the moon and the earth where gravity is cancelled out - so what you hear is the push and pull between structure and chaos, refinement and accident. Contradiction is the name of the game.