Title : The One Two Bird And The Half Horse
Artist : Orla Wren
Formats : CD, Digital
Label : Flau
Date : 2009
The One Two Bird And The Half Horse' is the second album from Orla Wren.
Recorded over the last two years in the environs of an isolated cold water cottage in the Scottish hills,
it develops Tui’s happy obsession with rendering the minutiae of nature into sonic form, combining the oldest,
wonkiest most organic of possible sound sources, instrumental or otherwise, fashioned into textures of pinprick detail.
A wide array of stylistically disparate musical and vocal collaborators, from places as varied as Japan,
the Georgian Republic and 'down-home' U.K., lend their weight to the process, alternately spooking and soothing the music,
filtered through Tui’s “wires” into an intensely colourful democratic weave.
Orla Wren is a dream child. It’s surfaces may be brilliantly modern, but it’s soul is ancient and gently unfolds itself
in a contemplative manner, revealing the antiquated isolation of the environments that have inspired it.
Keiron Phelan
”It distils sublime wood smoke folk atmosphere and pointallist digitalis to the subatomic level,
until it becomes effectively the same stuff that makes brooks babble and winds whisper.
It’s the music that Fennesz and Lau Nau might make after a night laying beneath the glittering constellations.”
Dave Sheppard|The Leaf Label
”Achingly beautiful.”
BOOMKAT
”When it comes to Orla Wren the music is the artist bio you need;
all the personal and personnel information you need is already laid out in the songs.
The One Two Bird …’ is the second album from Orla Wren and it works as both an incredibly lovely listening experience
and the sound of an artist stepping into his own unique musical identity.
Most of opening song“First Wooden Words” feels like a mosaic of melodies.
Ethereal vocals kick in with lyrics in a language not easily identified.
Instantly we feel as though we are being dragged off to some other place, but not just some other place, some place other worldly.
And really that word, ‘otherworldly’, tends to some up what makes Orla Wren works so magical
and again ‘magical’ feels like an excellent word for it.
Second song, “Seven Papers Torn” is a melancholy number with some lovely vocals to guide us into this strange new place.
The voice is painfully human, but the language is difficult to detect again, and that’s assuming these are even words at all.
By third piece “Tugboats and Railroads” Wren has completely transported us.
It’s as if wandering through some fairy tale land, some mystical place.
One of the wonderful things about ‘The One Two Bird…’ is that it often times feels like the less traditional the pieces become,
the more enchanting the album is.
One can sense from the music itself that this work is about documenting a sort of personal philosophy.
If debut album ‘Butterfly Wings Make’ was like that first great novel and each song like a great chapter,
then the ‘One Two Bird …’ is like a dictionary and each song is a new word and world to discover within each phoneme.
Orla Wren’s ‘The One Two Bird…’ is an important album for the artist and was an important hallmark for the underrated Flau label.
It’s a sophomore album where the work is more abstract, and yet, at the same time, the artist’s message seems clearer than ever.
It’s a bold second album, and the sound of an artist confidently proclaiming his own musical identity.
There aren’t many albums that can do what ‘The One Two Bird…’ does;
it has you enchanted as you listen, and when it’s finished you walk away re-invigorated.”
Brendan Moore|FLUID RADIO