Title : Butterfly Wings Make
Artist : Orla Wren
Formats : 12” Vinyl, CD, Digital
Label : Expanding Records
Date : 2006
”The debut album of Tui, using the pseudonym Orla Wren for the purposes of this fine album release.
Apparently, Tui travels Scotland selling various countryside photos of plants and organic life from a van,
before returning to create ambient abstractions using manipulated acoustic sounds.
Tui's tender respect for the natural environment is immediately apparent on the beautifully carved, speckled haze of the opening track,
Closure - fusing gentle piano chords with weaving strings within an atmosphere of swimming microscopic sound particles.
Myself And Movement is just as appealing, using glockenspiel sounds to create an oriental-flavoured wicker tapestry
of intertwining tones that are mesmerically melodic.
Much of Butterfly Wings Make oozes with introspective sadness, the ghosts and memories of past experience and dormant emotions
impatient for a creative channel litter the album.
However, Tui's expression is not one of torment, rather peaceful acceptance, love, and a general appreciation for the natural order of things.
Between The Rain And My Skin so delightfully encapsulates its subject matter, that one's breathe is almost taken away.
Tui is truly capable of reanimating the simplistic beauty of the natural environment, washing over the listener
with delicately chugging, discordant electronic rhythms, resuscitated by sumptous sun-speckled sound droplets.
The track Weir is most peculiar; I imagined gently rocking in an old wooden chair - in a shack in the forest,
completely impervious to the constraints of time.
Tui paints these images, probably different to one and all, with seemingly effortless ease
getting the balance right between abstract sound painting and musical empathy.
A fantastic debut and an album to be coveted.”
Danny Turner|Future Music
”A beautiful and moving album.”
Neural.it
”Orla Wren is also known as Tui and his is a one-man-and-his-van operation.
Hailing from the north of England, Tui travels Scotland, taking photographs of plants and organic life
and then returning to his Highland cottage to make electroacoustic music inspired by nature.
It’s craft rather than art, but meticulously wrought for all that.
Wren’s aesthetic promise is a modest one, but he makes good on it.
These are aural, environmental snapshots, but echoes of Nyman’s 1-100 (on Eno’s Obscure label)
as well as vivid inklings of drizzle, swaying straw and the droning and wheeling of summer insect life
suggest he has the wherewithal to crank up his ambitions to something grander should he be so inclined.”
David Stubbs|THE WIRE|issue 272 Oct 2006.
