Die Geschichte der Entstehung des Projekts Birdloom ist ebenso spannend wie die neun darauf enthaltenen Stücke. Im Jahr 2002 las Sharron Kraus eine Anzeige, die (der inzwischen verstorbene) David Muddyman (Loop Guru) geschaltet hatte: “Female singer, in the vain (sic) of Sandy Denny, Celia Humphris, or even Yma Sumac, wanted to pull English traditional folk music into the 21st Century. If you think a backing of Mongolian Drones, Screaming 60s organs and Transcengenic rhythms sounds appalling, please don’t reply. What I want is a singer with heart and passion and a sense of adventure. Preferably based in London or the South East. Initially this is a recording project only.”
Sharron Kraus war auf diesen Seiten schon häufig Thema und ist sicher eine der originellsten Stimmen des zeitgenössischen Folks, die immer (wieder) allzu einge Genregrenzen aufgebrochen hat und gerne mit anderen zusammengearbeitet hat. Sie selbst schreibt dann auch, dass eine Gemeinsamkeit von ihr und Muddyman „a shared love of and respect for traditional music, coupled with an eclecticism and experimental approach“ gewesen sei.
Aufnahmen wurden zwischen den beiden ausgetauscht, man überlegte gemeinsam, welche Stücke man interpretieren wolle: „We were both big fans of Shirley Collins and Martin Carthy, so drew on their repertoires. Dave had just ordered the 20 CD Voice of the People anthology from Topic Records, so that gave us a lot to wade through and I’d been digging around in books for lesser known traditional songs to sing at my local folk session. Most of the songs we ended up working with were ones we took from Shirley Collins and Martin Carthy, one exception being the Child Ballad ‘Brown Robin’ with its story of love, deception and cross-dressing involving a king’s daughter and her lover, which we were keen to include. We could find neither a recorded version of that song nor a tune associated with the words, so I wrote a tune for it and we recorded it. Our recording process for each song involved Dave building up layers of sound that I would then sing and add the occasional analogue instrument to. He would send me CDs of his work in progress and was sometimes anxious that I’d be shocked at how unorthodox his experiments were, so would email to let me know what he was sending so as to forewarn me.“
Die beiden beschrieben damals ihre Herangehensweise folgendermaßen: „The idea behind Birdloom is to mix ancient with even more ancient and tradition with modern. To take traditional English folk songs and enhance their stories with cinematic tendencies. To breathe rhythmic life into the cobwebs and create a new twenty-first century folk music.”
Damals hatte kein Label an den Aufnahmen Interesse. Sie sind jetzt auf Sharron Kraus’ Bandcampseite erhältlich.