“Maalie is the local ‘Orcadian’ dialect for the gull-like Fulmar, a grey and white seabird that’s related to the albatross…”

Will Burns writes:

‘There is something of the exile in all seabirds. And something then that brings them up against our ideas of memory, loss, home. What might 40 years of migration mean in the memory of a single Fulmar – compelled to travel, to return to the same clifface each year to breed? I found myself thinking strange things like this one morning in October, before I opened an email from [The Magnetic North’s] Erland Cooper which contained this track, named for the same bird I’d spent the past hour reading about. And the music I heard seemed somehow to describe, to mean, much of what I had been thinking on. Music made well carries meaning like this – like memory, beyond the paucity of thought or language’.

More on Erland and his forthcoming album (it isn’t out for a while) soon, but in the meantime, ‘Maalie’ can be bought or streamed here.