Polly Paulusma's Wildfires part 2
Features #9.2: Wildfires – Book & Visual Album...
This two parter centres around Wildfires, the album project undertaken by
. The first part - Gig & Album – was about the album launch gig I attended at a small studio venue near my home in Pembrokeshire, and the album itself. You can find that piece HERE. This second part - Book & Visual Album - takes a look at the beautiful hardback book that accompanies the project, plus the two-part visual album released on April 12 and 13th.Find the album and book at Bandcamp: https://pollypaulusma.bandcamp.com/merch and the visual album in two parts HERE and HERE (or see them in section 2 below)
Wildfires 2: Book & Visual Album
Book
I met Polly at the end of her set at Studio Owz back in March when she was just launching her album tour. She’d been singing for the best part of two and half hours, but was still doing her stint behind the merch table. I’d had my eye on the beautiful triple vinyl album (as a birthday present to myself), but online I’d also seen the beautiful hardbook book, Polly had produced to go with the record, and it was a souvenir that I had to have. The Wildfires album project is a multi-format, multi-media project, spanning visual art, film, music and writing. To get a sense of the experience I’d just had (see my write-up of that gig HERE), I settled on the CD version (a beautiful package in itself), together with the lovingly produced hardback book.
The book contains the lyrics of all the prose poem introductions and the songs on Wildfires, together with three short essays; whilst the booklet contained in the CD package contextualises each piece with a lyrical description of the ‘story’ of each of the two parts of the album, Sparks and Embers.
The whole thing is meticulous, like a looping reflexive, meditation on itself – on Polly’s own inner world, experiences and dreams – breathtakingly intimate but never seeming self indulgent. The words about words, the stories about songs, the prose poems that set the scene for each track, are like footsteps and symbols leading the way into an ancient forest – the land of the Celtic Tree… the ancient alphabet signs that mark the way throughout the album and printed material.
The first part of the book carries three short essays. What makes this whole project so unique is that Polly Paulusma is both a musician and a literary scholar. As she puts it herself in the first of the three, entitled “The creative quicksand”:
“I found myself in a dual creative state between the solid ground of literature and the sea of song. It matched my emotional state extraordinarily well.” And she adds: “My lopsided educational background may have something to do with it: I have a PhD in literature, but I can’t read music for toffee.”
Throughout the project there are these dualities: between literature and song; poetry and prose; short form and long form; thought and feeling; conscious and unconscious, “Or – one foot in the ego, the other slipping deliciously into the id.”.
In the essays she also expands on the writing process, including notebook pages and commentary on the origins of the songs and prelude pieces. She also writes about her collaborations with bassist Jon Thorne, who played with her that night at Studio Owz (see part one of this piece), and Ethan Johns, who produced the album and was the inspiration behind the choice of Studio Owz in Pembrokeshire as a place to record it. I don’t think I realised that night, watching Polly and Jon perform the album, how intimately entwined the whole piece is with the place!
This old chapel, now a studio, way out in the wilds of West Wales is an integral part of the album. It was performed there, improvised there and Polly and Ethan went out from the chapel to record the field recordings and prelude pieces in and around the nearby landscape, landmarks and sacred places. I live in the area, so I love and know it well; and so there’s a tingling feeling reading the words and listening to these songs that, maybe, I didn't quite understand before.
And more coincidence and meaning. On the night of the gig on that chilly night in early March, there was an amazing full moon with a giant halo hovering over the chapel. It was so striking that I took a photo and it’s the one at the top of the first piece about Wildfires (and below):
What I didn't know was that, as Polly puts it: “Full moons have shone over this album’s creation with surprising persistence.” She’s writing about another aspect of the album’s multidimensionality – the use of the ‘ogham’ alphabet in the design of the album and project visuals. Ogham was originally an Irish ‘tree alphabet’ and the symbols in it, the ‘tree letters’ “each has a moon and a month”. These full moons came out to accompany the making of the album, and the tree letters were utilised to make up the title: Wildfires, and the two parts: Sparks and Embers:
“The songs started to fly in through my window under an ivy full moon (9 October 2022)”, she writes, “…We recorded in Wales under the auspices of an elder full moon (27 November 2023)” and “Ethan and I finished the record under a hazel full moon (23 April 2024).
That night, I watched her perform all two hours of her beautiful album under an Ash full moon (March 9 2025)…
The second part of the book carries the lyrics and prose poems that introduce each song. Polly’ attention to detail means that she even provides the tuning for her guitar for each track! It’s beautifully laid out and, if you like lyric sheets in records, well, this one is a step up! It makes me very happy that I bought the CD and book combo.
One more bonus, however, comes in the CD pack. The booklet inside includes yet more short essays; the time a piece explaining the context, background and meaning of each of the songs. With all this beauty - and the gorgeous artwork and design too – it’s clear that this album is more than just an album. It’s a body of work in its own right – a project that in the hands of someone less skilled, knowledgeable and attuned, might seem a bit too much. But it never does. Each time I pick up the book, play the CD or read the CD note, there is something new to discover.
A new detail from life, from love, from the earth and, deeply, from art…
Visual album
This bit doesn’t need too much introduction, but it’s the final gift from Polly Paulusma’s beautiful Wildfires project, and demonstrates how much she cherishes and treasures these words and songs as offerings.
Once she returned from her tour, you might have forgiven her for taking a rest, but she instead decided to launch a visual version of the full album a couple of weeks back! Recorded, edited and mixed by Polly herself, there are two hour-long segments of this visual treat, part 1 and 2, coinciding with the two parts of the album. Matching the black and white aesthetic of the album itself, every song is presented in video form. In itself, this would be an impressive achievement, but on top of the rest of the Wildfires output, it’s truly amazing. This is part of what the blurb on YouTube says about the full project - this rare, long-form piece of musical and artistic genius :
“In an age of fatigue and dwindling attention spans, as well as targeted short-form content pushed over social media channels, Paulusma is asking us to slow down. ‘Wildfires’ is a callback, an ode to the concept album, intended to be listened to in a single, relaxed sitting, allowing for the interconnected stories of love in all its forms to reveal themselves. Like all good things, the reward here is in the commitment.”
You can find both videos linked to below. Very much worth a couple of hours of your time…
Coming soon…
Next week there’ll be the latest edition of my Listening2… series, and then in future weeks the second part of my LGBTQ+ feature on the TRAИƧA project which I’m very much been looking forward to sharing with you. There’ll be a great conversation with my album of the year artist from 2024 and Pembrokeshire neighbour of mine, Rona Mac. And Ziggy (aka Steve) will be doing another leftfield list of obscure and excellent musical finds…