Alice Boyd - Cloud Walking EP (2024) Hi-Res

A field recording of a gushing mountain stream, swathes of harp, an ethereal wordless hum: the first few moments of Alice Boyd’s second EP, Cloud Walking, situate you in a specific but somehow nebulous soundworld, pitched somewhere between the meditative new age music of Joanna Brouk, the dreamy harp-scapes of Mary Lattimore, and Joanna Newsom at her most pastoral. That first track, The Mountain, is only a minute and a half long, but it lays the groundwork for the creation of a stunning musical world, a place that can be homely and recognisable one moment, thrilling and mysterious the next.

Once that opening statement is made, Boyd drills down into the particulars. A skilled sound artist and composer, here she embraces her inner singer-songwriter: second track, Little River, traces a serpentine course from mountain to sea, Boyd’s lyrics unfolding unhurriedly, bringing her meditative compositional sense to a folkier idiom. Towards the end, strings and multi-tracked voices take over from the strummed acoustic guitar, welling up with unconstrained wildness and unapologetic emotion.

The inspiration behind Cloud Walking came partly from Nan Shepherd’s book The Living Mountain, which has earned itself an almost mythological status as an ur-text of the genre loosely termed nature writing. Boyd isn’t the first to attempt to translate some of the book’s magic into music, but she is certainly one of the most successful. O The Sun – which sees Boyd at her folkiest – is awash with bright acoustic guitar and foregrounded vocals. It has a timelessness to it, an almost skiffle-like simplicity that hides a deep affinity with landscape. That affinity is hard-won: Boyd was part of a four-day expedition in the Cairngorms, following in Shepherd’s footsteps, and the field recordings on Cloud Walking came from that expedition.

It’s not the first time Boyd has used landscape as a jumping-off point for her artistic endeavours. She spent time as the Eden Project’s artist in residence, a role which resulted in the 2023 release From the Understory, which used experimental approaches to the human voice and electronic recording to explore the diverse and delicate nature of ecosystems. And earlier this year she released a Brian Eno-approved soundtrack to Michelle Sanders’ film Arctic Ice: Under the Midnight Sun. But Cloud Walking feels like her most personal release to date.

Although the EP is very much Boyd’s vision, it revels in the freedoms afforded by collaboration. From the stunning introduction of Rachel Kitchlew’s harp to the unexpected saxophone of Amy Howard and Tom Penn’s gorgeous strings, a spirit of shared creativity permeates all five of these songs. One of the most prominent collaborators is Jacob Norris, who gets a co-credit on Heart ii (the song is a direct response to Norris’ Heart and is a gentle, wide-eyed, pastoral folk song swaddled in the rich sounds of the mountain).

In the Rain, which closes the EP, is almost transcendental in its quiet lushness. The backing vocals are like silken swathes; you can almost see the shimmer of the harp; the studio effects and Howard’s soft sax lull you into a more peaceful state; the three words of the title are repeated like a mantra. It seems to represent the coming-together of the whole project, a moment of peace and an expression of a profound connection between art and nature. Such a perfectly realised amalgamation of concept, melody and landscape is vanishingly rare, but Boyd achieves it with an easy grace.