Poetry and music have a complex, sometimes uneasy, relationship. Poets put the music in the words, while lyricists tend to strip their writing back to leave space for the music to occupy. It can be tricky to balance writing and playing so each enhances the other, but when it works, it can be something special. This is where Nightingale Floor come in. They are a quartet of improvising musicians and a poet, and Five Stagings is their first album. It’s a record made in the North West. The words are written and spoken by Manchester poet Lauren McLean. The musicians are cellist Josh Horsley of Preston duo Powders, Benjamin D. Duvall of Liverpool four-piece Ex-Easter Island Head on sound collages, strings and trombone, and David McLean, ex-Tombed Visions label head, playing saxophones, keyboards and bass.
The album was created during what the band describe as long-form improvisation, which conjures up an image of loose, free music, but Five Stagings is not like that at all. The pieces are ‘stagings’, with tracks built up carefully like, as the band describes it, “a sequence of vivid dream-like tableaux” in “the bare interior of a Mancunian garage”. The sound the group makes is honed and balanced, forming sophisticated and highly atmospheric soundscapes. The three range across instruments and techniques, leaving us unsure how many people are really playing. It is varied, powerful and very impressive. ‘Crystal Radio’ has a bass that bounces like a rubber ball, distant squeaking strings and the sounds of weather building in the distance. ‘Lion to Feel’ sounds more like a chamber orchestra performing on a stormy beach, wind chimes clanging in the breeze. ‘Meudon, 1928’ uses a rumbling cello and sea bird sounds. There are echoes of Jon Hassell and Fourth World music, and of Delia Derbyshire and of North Sea Radio Orchestra.
Lauren McLean’s words match the commitment and quality of the playing. The album’s five tracks have enticing titles – ‘The Copse and the Hunting Lodge’, for example, with echoes of Poe, or ‘Meudon, 1928’, a reference to a street photograph taken by André Kertész. She performs in a style that is not singing, but is definitely rhythmic, full of tone and at one with the music. “Your skin tastes like salt” she whispers on ‘Plum Dark’, over the hum of heat rising from the earth and the rumble of a gathering thunder storm. “Can I crawl into them” repeatedly, insistently on ‘Meudon, 1928’.
Five Stagings is an immersive album, a much-abused term that, in this case, is entirely justified. The production makes her voice feel very close to the listener, whispering in their ear. The contrast between McLean’s intimacy and the wide open spaces that shiver and shimmer behind her generates a self-contained world. On ‘Plum Dark’, it actually feels as though we’re becoming submerged, listening to a steady torrent of water, a soaring cello that might be in our imaginations, and McLean, revealing intimate things.
It is hard to believe this is Nightingale Floor’s first recording. Five Stagings emerges fully formed, a deeply satisfying collaboration grounded in the Lancashire landscapes and weather – the album was recorded in cold winters and hot summers during 2022 and 2023 – with a powerful sense of place. The performers are completely confident in what they want to achieve, and have given us something exceptional.
