Bird Burning

Songs of the sky take flight on Sasha’s highly acclaimed second album. ‘Bird Burning’ (2016) is a heart-shaking song-cycle which 'explores what it means to be born, to die, to be reborn - and undergo the transformative processes that are constantly recycling throughout life.”

The album was recorded at the Green House Studios in Iceland with renowned producer Valgeir Sigurðsson (Björk, Feist, Sigur Rós) following a trip to the North of Norway where her father’s family originate from. While in Scandinavia she came across Sami Shaman and renowned musician Mari Boine.

Mari taught me many things including the importance of “singing from our sex to get to our soul”. She revealed much to me about the Sami tradition of yoiking. Yoking is a sort of trance-like singing to create a musical magic spell… The Sami don’t sing songs about things or people or places, they invoke them directly in to existence. While my songs don't sound anything like traditional Yoiks - they’ve been heavily influenced by this approach.

The album invokes 5 birds - the Crow, Swan, Peacock, Pelican, and Phoenix - traditionally used by Medieval alchemists to symbolise a soul’s journey through life (birth - death - rebirth) and maps these onto a relationship narrative (written as a reconfiguring of Robert Schumann’s Frauen-Liebe und Leben (1840)): from initial spark of attraction, building into an all consuming passion, and eventually combusting to leave only the ash of memory. Interwoven with these bird songs are joining ‘Air’ songs. An air is a musical form used by composers in the Medieval period, as well as - obviously - the medium birds fly through. The result is a raw contemporary love story that is both personal and epic in scope, in which the intimate and the mythic intertwine.

The magical thinking in the songs - which blends the personal with the archetypal - was heavily influenced by the months Siem spent studying with American poet Jorie Graham - one the century’s most celebrated poets and a Pulitzer Prize winner - in Boston, USA. Graham discussed poetry as a river that runs through the generations, with the best poets being those who "have a voice but have ultimately tapped into that river that's going to keep going without them, without anyone".

Bird Burning is the sound of Sasha Siem rediscovering these connections, between the ancient and modern, romantic love and a sense of something beyond the physical realm as inspired by the intensity of the Icelandic landscape:

Iceland is magical. I was blessed to experience much of its wondrous otherworldliness while I was there. There is simultaneously a gentleness and a terrifying power to the nature which effects everything. Nature communicates in a direct way there which isn’t possible in London where most of the land is asphalted. The Northern Lights came out on the night we finished the album which was spectacular.

In Iceland when you talk to people it's a given that there are fairies and spirits, and there's nothing weird about acknowledging those unseen energies. After all sound cannot necessarily be seen. Sound is vibration. All matter is also vibration. In that sense, everything around us is sound.

The work was toured to 30 venues across the UK and abroad following its release.

"Bird Burning is a spectacular record on several levels, successfully tackling concepts other artists would rightly shy from” - The Line of Best Fit

“Sweeping, widescreen grandeur… both contagious and quite, quite affecting” - Clash

"Bewitchingly rhythms and swirling drama" - Wonderland Magazine

“A vivid description and magnificent introspection for a very moving experience navigating the ambivalence of seeking, finding, and maintaining a loving relationship” - Stereogum