Album Notes

Mouthmusic's sixth album "the order of things" is an intimate affair, acoustic in essence but with moments of high distorted drama. There are six songs written by mouthmusic helmsman Martin Swan, two traditional Irish language ballads (including the great Republican love song to Ireland "Roisin Dubh"), and one instrumental, "The Dae Doers", said to be the oldest piece of Scottish music surviving in written form.
Turning his back on every kind of studio gizmo, Swan has produced an album of singing & playing where the emotion of the performance is what counts. The costituent parts of the tapestry are wierd and wonderful - imagine Oumou Sangare's band stranded in the Arctic, fed on a diet of seal's blubber and forced to collaborate on a Broadway musical with Wittgenstein (late period) - but the end result is Mouthmusic's most accessible and popular work to date. The songs cover all the big issues - death, speechlessness, paternity disputes, underwater sex, and the films of Akira Kurosawa - but these are surely more legitimate themes for the modern troubador than the love of boys and girls or disdain for the military-industrial complex ...

For Martin's "author's notes" on each of the songs on the album, just follow the link to the mouthmusic website.