Album: Three Cane Whale - Hibernacula

Since their eponymous 2011 debut, Three Cane Whale have kept it small without losing scale. A trio of Spiro’s Alex Vann, Get The Blessing’s Pete Judge, and guitarist Paul Bradley, together they often often recorded plein air, on hillsides, above waterfalls, in ancient churches and old barns.

For their sixth set, they chose St George’s Bristol, famed for its acoustic, and turned to Leveret’s Rob Harbron as producer, who was also there for them for Holts & Hovers, and the charming mini-album 303 recorded in 2019 on the slopes of Cadbury Hill, in earshot of the A303, and all the traffic on the road to the sun.

They may be three, but combine a sweet flow of bowed psaltery, zither, mandolin, guitar, harmonium, trumpet, chimes, flugelhorn and more, coming in a range of colours and tones. By drawing their inspirations and melodies from the spirits of place, they render sound worlds that are often barely longer than a minute, but feel expansive – bigger on the inside than are the outside.

Hibernacula is no Scottish vampire tale, but those places where animals take to for the hibernating months. It echoes down the lanes that wind their way back to Holts & Hovers, their enchanted field-recording album from 2012, whose name derives from the places where otters take sanctuary. Similarly, Hibernacula sees this perfectly formed trio take inspiration from their own favourite sanctuaries and landscapes.

As player/composers, there’s a kind of communing egolessness to their ventures into each others hollows, beginning with the first and closing tracks improvised by the group – that’s “Dawn” and “Dusk”, both big 'scapes of the imagination. Between them come the likes of Alex Vann’s mandolin piece “Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork”, sounding uncannily like a Haunted Generation soundtrack to a disconcerting children’s TV drama from the 1970s whose name is on the tip of your tongue. Pete Judge’s “Aestune” is adapted from a lovely solo album of short pieces, Piano 3, he issued in 2023, while Paul Bradley’s pieces rang from the pensive shades of “McGurk’s Evening” and the spindle of melodies that make up “Witches Hollow” to the guitar-horn duet of “West-Running Brook”. You’ll hear the suspended animation of fairytale in the wonderfully titled “The Last Traveller’s Dream Under the Hill” from Pete Judge, and the collective farewell on “Dusk” is a beautiful, breathy subliminal exhalation of psaltery and harmonium that could be trailing from another room, or from another, more enchanted world beside our own.

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