Mathias Kom is the first singer and songwriter behind the Canadian cult folks band The Burning Hell. He has lengthy been fascinated with birds, however, significantly with the 2022 album ‘Rubbish Island’, birds have taken a extra distinguished function in his songwriting. He lives and writes in rural Prince Edward Island, Canada.
The primary track I ever wrote a few chook was referred to as “Little Seagull,” lengthy earlier than I had any concept that the phrase seagull was a heinous colloquialism that no self-respecting chook lover would ever use. I wrote it whereas sitting with an inexpensive ukulele on a seaside close to Corpus Christi, Texas (not removed from the northern fringe of Padre Island Nationwide Seashore, one of the crucial famend birdwatching places within the southern US). Listening to the sound of the gulls throughout me, I used to be struck by how our evaluations of birdsong are filtered via such a subjectively human – but additionally profoundly cultural – lens. How can we determine what makes a specific track or name lovely, and others much less so? The little track got here out of me suddenly, a bouncy, foolish three-chord factor with a bridge that ends with a twist:
Why don’t seagulls ever sing?
Are you too busy doing different issues?
Only one flap of your seagull wings
And the world is destroyed
That was again in 2007, and since then I’ve written and recorded dozens of different songs, with a scattered reference to birds right here and there. However it wasn’t till I moved to the shores of rural Prince Edward Island in 2015 that birds began showing extra typically in my work. I reside close by of a rocky sandstone seaside, and my every day life for the final decade has been accompanied by gulls of all kinds, but additionally bald eagles, Northern gannets, cormorants, a number of species of tern, numerous plover, sandpipers, and all the opposite normal and typically uncommon suspects you’d anticipate finding on the shores of Japanese Canada. Within the woods and fields round my home, blue jays and chickadees and Northern harriers are my dependable neighbors, and Ruby-throated hummingbirds are my fixed gardening companions. A number of kilometers down the highway is East Level, which is among the finest birding spots on the island, well-known as a resting place for migrants and surprising friends, just like the crested caracara that confirmed up final 12 months and spent the higher a part of three months sitting in a tree gorging on the lobster carcasses a neighborhood farmer helpfully piled up a close-by subject.
It’s not unusual for songwriters to include elements of the world round them into their work. The streets of New York are virtually a important character within the songs of Lou Reed, for example, and numerous Californians, from locals just like the Seashore Boys to imports like Joni Mitchell, have created a sonic picture of the state that looms giant within the collective consciousness of tens of millions of people that have by no means set foot there. It’s laborious to think about soul music with out the city grit of Detroit and Memphis, traditional and up to date nation with out the romanticized grime roads and roadhouses of the agricultural south, and so forth.
However birds are one thing else solely, and their simultaneous ubiquity and variety implies that everybody in all places has at the least some relationship with them. This has virtually definitely been true since earlier than people had been people. The oldest musical instrument on the earth is a 60,000 year-old bear-bone flute made by our Neanderthal ancestors in what’s now Slovenia, and it’s not laborious to think about that Neanderthal musicians would have been at the least partly impressed by the songs of the birds round them. The historical past of music-making is totally intertwined with birdsong, from historical folks tunes to Mozart to Kate Bush, and examples could be present in each human tradition. Whereas finding out for my PhD in ethnomusicology, I used to be struck by the now-classic ethnographic work of Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Music in Kaluli Expression, which particulars the outstanding ways in which the Kaluli folks of Papua New Guinea incorporate birdsong into their every day lives. Whereas the Kaluli present a uniquely wealthy instance, one of many impacts of Feld’s work was to bolster the rising subject of acoustemology – the anthropology of sound – and the understanding of simply how deeply interconnected human sound-making practices are with the pure and constructed environments we work and play in.
However I received’t fake I used to be desirous about any of that, even for a minute, once I wrote the songs that ultimately grew to become Rubbish Island. As an alternative, I had learn an article in regards to the Nice Pacific Trash Vortex, which urged an unimaginable picture of the huge gyre of rubbish as an precise landmass, a mountain of plastic rising from the ocean. In fact, the truth is that the varied trash vortexes our runaway consumption have created are made up principally of microplastics and small bits of marine particles which might be always in movement, however I used to be drawn to the concept rising sea ranges and the eventual collapse of what we hilariously name ‘civilization’ would sooner or later result in a Waterworld-like planet, with nothing however ocean for miles, interrupted solely by a small island made from our personal refuse and populated principally by birds.
This imagery was so compelling to me that I began writing songs round it, starting with “Chicken Queen of Rubbish Island”, the first-person narrative of the imagined ruler of the brand new world demanding obeisance from her topics:
Gannets and gulls, petrels, puffins and pelicans:
Make me a temple of nets and fish skeletons
Subsequent take the buoys, bottles, dongles and ping pong balls
Construct a wall all alongside the horizon and ten instances as tall.
I misplaced a watch to an albatross with mischief in his coronary heart
However I changed it with this ball-bearing painted to look the half
I’m a pacesetter with a singular imaginative and prescient, or for those who want, a cyclops tyrant
All hail the Chicken Queen of Rubbish Island
One other newspaper article impressed the track “Nigel the Gannet”, not a denizen of Rubbish Island per se however a real-life gannet in New Zealand whose eulogy made the papers. Nigel was dubbed the “world’s loneliest chook” as a result of he lived alone with a concrete gannet decoy he had taken as his mate. However I puzzled if maybe Nigel knew precisely what he was doing, and was merely the gannet equal of the hermit who turns their again on their fellow people, preferring solitude to society:
The bird-banders fill binders and books together with his biography
They observe his habits and report his squawks on dictaphones
In the meantime Nigel wonders “why don’t they ever ask me?
I may inform them there’s a distinction between being lonely and being alone.”
The scientists revealed papers and secured some grants
To repopulate Nigel’s future neighbourhood
With a concrete caster named Carl they concocted a plan
However they couldn’t have predicted Nigel’s dedication to bachelorhood
Referred to as to the concrete colony by a cassette
Nigel observed the opposite birds didn’t fly or flap round
He remembered an outdated French peacock had advised him “hell is different birds”
He thought “Effectively, that is simply the type of place I’d wish to calm down!”
Illustration: Ariel Sharratt
On a regular basis I used to be writing these songs I used to be discovering a brand new appreciation for the birdlife throughout me. Like so many people, the pandemic compelled me to remain dwelling, and I inevitably began to note issues I hadn’t actually appreciated earlier than, like the best way the native crows would harass eagles 4 instances their dimension, or the complexity of the hierarchies among the many numerous gulls on the shore, or the unimaginable variety of the communication between chickadees. My companion and bandmate Ariel Sharratt purchased me a pair of first rate binoculars, and I step by step took my first amateurish steps on the earth of birding. I found in a short time that I had no actual urge for food for lists and no expertise for images, however I may fortunately watch our feathered neighbors for hours and never become bored with it. I started to think about the act of birdwatching itself as a metaphor for our greatest human impulses, a passive type of resistance to the hyper-consumption, distraction, and velocity of Twenty first-century life. With “Birdwatching” I attempted to distill these ideas right into a two-minute rapid-fire punk track:
There’s a flower within the compost and a seaside under the pavement
We’ll outlive the wealthy and well-known if we stay aimless and affected person
We’re neither rising like a phoenix nor dying just like the dodos
So let’s depart the infinite questing to the Sams and to the Frodos
Anthems are anathema, sufficient with rousing choruses
And attaining is as torturous as tickling gradual lorises
The seek for extra and higher provides us worse and fewer choices
So let’s give up whereas we’re behind, and do some birdwatching
Entrepreneurship is capsizing and it’ll certainly sink
Leap and swim to Rubbish Island and simply sit and have a drink
Whereas all people else is busy sprucing their coffins
We’ll be mixing cosmopolitans, and birdwatching
In direction of the tip of compiling and recording the songs on Rubbish Island, I knew I needed to counsel the seeds of a future utopia contained in the horror of apocalypse, the concept in our personal self-destruction, we’d discover a approach to re-balance our existence with, somewhat than towards, the pure world. On the penultimate track “Speechlessness,” the unnamed human protagonists slowly cease talking and spend their time in remark:
Life’s a seaside now, and that’s not an expression
The air above us is stuffed with wings in each course
The years go by we watch them migrate and return
To the whole lot there’s a seabird, tern tern tern
I’ve at all times been drawn to idea albums, particularly once they contact on numerous iterations of the apocalypse, and I stay enamored with birds. I’ve simply completed a brand new album with my band, which will likely be launched within the spring of 2025. It’s much less straight about birds than Rubbish Island, however birds do make their look as narrators and bystanders, and even protagonists. There are songs partly impressed by the work of ornithologist Richard Loyn, who we met whereas on tour in Australia in 2023, and who took us birding round his dwelling and defined a few of his analysis on the sewage therapy plant in Werribee, which has – because of our personal human waste – turn out to be an unlikely birding hotspot. Elsewhere, an unnamed LBB / LBJ is the final creature to hold a reminiscence of human beings, however they promptly overlook all about us when distracted by a shiny piece of string.
And so forth. I can’t think about ever devoting all of my songwriting efforts solely to birds, however neither can I think about my songs with out them. Writing about birds has led me down new paths, each creatively and actually, and related me with fellow chook lovers everywhere in the world. Birds had been round lengthy earlier than we had been right here, and despite our greatest efforts at destroying them, will likely be round lengthy after we’re gone. I really feel privileged to share a world with them, if just for a short while.
