Enchanted Winter

Credits for Enchanted Winter
Vocals, composition, arrangement	Jillian LaDage
Strings	Chris Wagoner & Mary Gaines
Percussion	Todd Hammes
Cover artwork	Hand drawn — included as a printable colouring page with the album
Released by	Tarith Cote

Album · 2015

Seasonal album · nine tracks

New seasonal pieces alongside lesser-known traditional songs, with a wide range of musical nuance from Celtic to Middle Eastern — and a hand-drawn cover that doubles as a colouring page.

Instrumentation. Harp, piano, voice, strings, frame drum, bodhrán, riq, clarinet and hand percussion.

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Tracks — select a title for notes

The carol everyone half-remembers, taken out of the parish hall and set against a drone and a slow frame-drum pulse until the modal bones of it show.
Sir Walter Scott’s literary work set in hauntingly medieval strains — the longest-arc arrangement on the record.
An original. Voice, harp and a string quartet that never quite resolves, written for the hour when the frost sets.
A traditional-inspired lament: the ground closed, the year spent, the waiting begun.
Middle Eastern dance rhythms under a Renaissance dance form — the clearest statement of the album’s fusion thesis.
A seventeenth-century broadside tune given a processional treatment, bodhrán forward, voice stacked in fifths.
Original. The bracken turning red on the hillside as the first warning of the turn.
The Welsh new-year carol — the melody English speakers know as “Deck the Halls”, returned to its own language and its own tempo.
A Northumbrian song of departure to close the record; almost unaccompanied, the last minute nothing but voice and room.

The season

“Out of all the seasons winter perhaps embodies the greatest sense of mystery and wonder,” Jillian writes. “Exploring the diverse celebrations and traditions of this season, I hoped to discover what indeed is this enchantment, which is only found during these few months of the year and leads us into quiet contemplative months of joy and awe.”

The literary work of Sir Walter Scott’s “Christmas In The Olden Time”, set in hauntingly medieval strains, leads to the traditional-inspired lament “Come Winter Ground” and into the Middle-Eastern-dance-inspired rhythms of “Bergamask Dance”.

The bonus

While being immersed in this enchanted world, you can create your own art from the original hand-drawn cover: an adult-colouring-book-inspired page is available as a bonus download with the album, printed at full bleed and sized for a standard sheet.

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