On rare occa­sions, a piece of music is released that exists in a sphere of its own, defi­ant­ly unique and refus­ing to be slot­ted into this or that genre. Some­thing that stops you in your tracks. The just-released To Cry Out in the Wilder­ness by Scions on Idée Fixe Records is such an album, a pas­sion­ate­ly con­struct­ed work pri­mar­i­ly about cli­mate dis­as­ter, with a strange, enig­mat­ic and quirky beauty.

The cre­ation of To Cry Out in the Wilder­ness is an inter­est­ing tale in itself, com­pris­ing three Cana­di­an projects who ini­tial­ly came togeth­er spon­ta­neous­ly at a fes­ti­val; their per­for­mance saw them receive a stand­ing ova­tion. A writ­ing res­i­den­cy in the Thou­sand Islands fol­lowed, where the sev­en core mem­bers col­lab­o­rat­ed intense­ly to pro­duce this work. 

Call­ing them­selves Scions, the col­lec­tive are made up of Nova Scotia’s award-win­ning min­i­mal­ist cham­ber-jazz quar­tet New Her­mitage, Ontario’s Polaris-nom­i­nat­ed drone-hymn duo Joy­ful, Joy­ful (with the duo’s vocal­ist Cor­mac Cul­keen plays a cen­tral part in this album) and the cel­e­brat­ed pro­duc­er and com­pos­er Michael Cloud Duguay. The range of gen­res the three projects encom­pass is exten­sive – from folk to jazz to choral and more – and the artists make full use of their skills, mak­ing this a tru­ly ground­break­ing and explorato­ry album.

The album was record­ed exclu­sive­ly using renew­able ener­gy, using a portable solar-pow­ered stu­dio. Scions chose to record it in St Georges Round Church in Hal­i­fax, Cana­da, which burnt down in 1996 and was rebuilt through the com­bined efforts of the local com­mu­ni­ty. And Scions saw the church as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to solid­i­fy the album’s main theme of “hope in the face of doom”.

Moss Lung opens with the sound of breath­ing before we are tak­en back into the pri­mor­dial soup of exis­tence when the earth was formed while bird sounds can be heard and winds howl. This tex­tured, ambi­ent track cre­ates a still­ness and a med­i­ta­tive qual­i­ty, and pre­pares us for what is to follow.

The lynch­pin of the album is the mon­u­men­tal title track To Cry Out in the Wilder­ness which almost takes your breath away with its spo­ken word lyrics, a haunt­ing con­fes­sion­al piece relat­ing to the cat­a­stroph­ic eco­log­i­cal changes that are unfold­ing, jux­ta­posed with the nar­ra­tor’s deep human desire to have a child. “Who would want to bring a child into this time of ter­ri­ble unease?” The vocals com­mence as if at a dis­tance, muf­fled, before grad­u­al­ly become clear­er and more insis­tent, ampli­fy­ing the pow­er of the words and pro­duc­ing a dra­mat­ic and even chill­ing effect. The track is almost 10 min­utes long, giv­ing the track time to breathe and for its full nar­ra­tive to reveal itself.

Fight Song is the track that Scions released as a sin­gle and gives the choral voic­es a chance to shine; it is a rous­ing num­ber about mak­ing a stand against defor­esta­tion, gird­ing our loins against fur­ther destruc­tion of such an essen­tial part of our plan­et.“When we go down, we go down swing­ing, for the axe must be disobeyed”.

The still­ness and pro­found­ly immer­sive qual­i­ties of the drone also fea­ture, as in the penul­ti­mate Equals in Hope, with shades of Lankum in its med­i­ta­tive qual­i­ty that draws you into its core.

Cov­er­ing a range of emo­tion from melan­choly to rap­ture, To Cry Out in the Wilder­ness pos­sess­es a raw ener­gy, a reflec­tion of the meld­ing of three dis­tinc­tive and tal­ent­ed cre­ative forces, express­ing the anguish of a – per­haps – lost world that we will fight for with every breath in our body.

To Cry Out in the Wilder­ness by Scions on Idée Fixe Records