Arborea have been doing the rounds on channel 2′s playlist for a while now and are proving to be a popular choice. I recently discovered a great interview from the limited edition Magpie Magazine and thought you may like to read and find out a bit more about the wonderful duo…

When did you both begin to make music?

Shanti – I guess I seriously began to make music about four years ago, but I come from a very musical family: there was always music, recording, practice and gigs happening, so I’ve been saturated in it all my life. I just wasn’t very interested in it personally until these past few years…

Buck – I’ve been making music for over 25 years, but was never satisfied doing it alone. I think finding another person, or a group of people that you can work well with can be a deep challenge, and something I’ve rarely experienced in all those years. Shanti and I have been married for 10 years and I always knew she had an amazing voice, and although she could already play the guitar and knew some old folk tunes her mother had showed her years ago, it took her years to finally open up and start singing. I gave her a banjo on her birthday during the summer of 2005 and she just took off…it was truly amazing! We also had a lot of backyard parties that summer with other poets and musicians and that interaction really helped her open up.

How would you describe your sound?

Shanti – I would describe it as earhtly and etheral, dreamy and fervent and maybe a bit melancholy…nothing pragmatic about it, it’s more of an emotional narrative of our lives.

What inspires you to make music?

Shanti – A lot of things inspire – I wish to escape my direct environment, but also to reinterpret that which I understand, to help it thrive with beauty and energy. I have a reverance for the mystery and magic in this world and I know it beats in rhythm with my heart and flows in my veins as one with my blood, and I draw it deep into my lungs with the air I breathe in. To make music and songs of love and life is only a natural trade – a giving back to what I have taken in. I strive to carry on in harmony, to find and bond with the great, secret, vague, beautiful truth.

Buck – Sharing my life with Shanti and the experiences we’ve had is my dearest inspiration. Then there are our two wild and beautiful children. Also the duality of the rugged and soft beauty of nature, history, and dear friends!

Are they inspired by the natural landscape near your home?

Shanti – Oh yes! Golden sun, a gentle breeze, green and verdant fields, gentle caressing water, tumbling, singing brooks, wild mountains, oh! I saw a mama moose and her baby standing in the roadway last week – it was so incredible, my heart was beating fast, we were in a car, but moose can sometimes be very agressive and I was hoping she wouldn’t charge at us, in defence of her baby. I felt blessed to have seen them – and Buck just saw tow bald eagles soaring in the air near our house, whilst I am sitting here writing this…

The winter is exceptionally inspiring in a particular way. It can be so isolating, and deadly, gloomy, dreary, despondent, lonely, and so very, very cold. All the songs from our latest album were written and recorded during the winter and I think it really reflects what we were going through. There is this sense of the infinite loneliness of the landscape paired with the friction of two lovers left alone and forsaken in a gorgeous and fatal place.

Buck – A lot of the songs we’ve created together on both records have been inspired by our natural landscapes. ‘Black Mountain Road’ is a place near her grandfather’s house, which is near the Appalachian trail here in Maine. ‘On To The Shore’, from Wayfaring Summer is an ode to a place where we take our children every summer and describes through words and music the path we have to take to get to the ocean. It’s a two mile hike up a soft mountain and then down to an isolated beach. A place we visit every summer…rugged and so beautiful.

Of course these are landscapes we can’t afford to take for granted, and places that are gradually disappearing because of development. We moved to Maine 8 years ago, to start a different life, away from the crowded city and coastline of Virginia, and to be closer to Shanti’s family. Ireland is another place of great inspiration, the beauty of the Wicklow Mountains and the earthiness of Dublin!

How do you begin to write a song? Are they improvised?

Shanti – Quite a lot of the music is improvised – I think that is why it has such mood to it. We knowingly try to encapsulate a moment, or feeling, like immortalizing a photograph. A few songs required a bit of work, but there are still some moments that are spontaneous.

Buck – Some of the lyrics for songs like Black Mountain Road and River and Rapids are very crafted and took a lot of time to get right. Hopefully they convey a strong vibrant image, a place and time, through music. On the song Idles of March for example, we turned on the mic and Shanti picked up a guitar and started strumming random chords, first take and completely improvised. We then reversed the track. I put the headphones on and we recorded my slide guitar improvisation over that, and so on. We create a lot of music in that manner, as a true collaboration, one action inspiring the next. Helena Espvall’s cello parts on Red Bird and Black Mountain Road were all recorded in a studio in Philadelphia a couple of hours before she had to fly to England, to perform with Espers. She improvised lots of tracks so we would have many takes to choose from. The thing was that all her takes were so beautiful we ended up using almost everything, creating small orchestras of her music.

Where di the name Arborea come from?

Buck – In the late summer of 1997 through that Autumn I lived in Dublin, Ireland and I have a good friend who was friends with a Dublin musicalCollective who called themselves Arborea. That collective was a perfect marriage of Theatre and Music and I saw them perform several times.

The concept of the band and their name, which for some reason reminded me more of the Aurora Borealis than a deep forest, was something that was a huge inspiration and always stayed with me. Anyway, in the summer of 2005 when Shanti and I decided it was time to start recording our first album, we started searching for a proper name and eventually I pulled out Arborea and checked to see if the Dublin band was still in existence and couldn’t find anything. The other reality of the name is that it has intense dark forest imagery, and a large part of the initial of our sound came from the idea of two people creating music in a dark holler in the mountains and the sound of our instruments and voices reflecting of the mountains, and water and echoing through the trees…a primordial Cathedral. It seemed a perfect name really.

What message do you hope to convey to your listeners?

Shanti - Well, I hesitate to say I want to convey a message, we live in a time where people are sick of being told what to do, or how to feel or think, and I am very conciouss of that. My best hope is that our music somehow enhances the experiences you are already having, that it comes with you on your passage…like a friend or a lover who helps the time pass splendidly.

Buck – Shanti said it best!

Make sure to check out the sounds of Arborea here:

www.myspace.com/arborea2

Also well worth checking out the Magpie Magazine and grabing a copy here:

www.magpiemagazine.blogspot.com