On her first album in 12 years, Scottish vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Dot Allison picks up where she left off penning free-floating folk ballads that thread the needle between the near-whispered ambient folk of Grouper and the just-a-bit-haunted orchestral sounds of Azure Ray. One of the record’s standout tracks, “One Love,” softly explores the inherent insecurities of a romantic relationship, with Allison tapping into her botanical knowledge to craft lyrical metaphors: “The flower metaphors are rare flowers used to signify a rare, precious, all-encompassing love,” she shared when the song originally dropped. “Blood Camellia suggests flesh, veins, and a pulse; fire lilies imbue a sense of passion, and Juliette Rose seems to hint at Shakespeare.”
Today the song is getting an equally dreamy visual, which places the song in a similar field to the one that likely populated your mind’s eye upon first hearing the single. “We ended up shooting the video on what turned out to be two piping hot days in July in and around Bristol and Wales,” shares director Maria Mochnacz of the video, which doubles down on the plant imagery of “One Love.” “It was myself, John Minton—wonderful, lo-fi, experimental cameraman and all-round one-man-band—and Honor and Hopey Parish. During one of the lockdown stages I went to sit in their garden and they started doing a K-pop dance, so I stored that memory away and asked them if they’d be up for being in this video. We drove off in John’s car, the four of us with my giant mirror ball packed in the boot and a whole host of other lo-fi lighting devices.”
You can watch the video below, and for more detail on the specific scientific influences on the album, Allison has penned a brief letter beneath the visual explaining the names listed in the record sleeve’s thank-you notes.
If you look at the vinyl and the sleeve notes of Heart-Shaped Scars, at the end of the list of thank-yous are three names: Edgar Mitchell of the Apollo 14/the 6th astronaut to walk on the moon, Rupert Sheldrake, the eminent biologist and free thinking heretic, and Stephen Harrod Bhuner, an independent scholar and polymath. I wanted to write about how these three—imho—enlightened individuals came to be on my thank-you list.
I was reading about the Woodstock Fruit Festival in about 2013 and I noted that in a reading list by one of the speakers there, an author had listed books and authors he was inspired by including Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. So I felt compelled to order the book, upon reading the title.
This book has affected me greatly as it describes emergent patterns in nature and describes a quiet yet profound living intelligence in the natural world that, only if we are silent and still enough for a moment, we can truly begin to hear it. On the back cover of the book there is a picture of a flower or two and the author asks us to turn to a certain page in order to find out the name of the flower. When you do this it reveals to the reader that the flower in the picture is, in fact, a photograph of the sonar pattern of whale and dolphin song. In this instant it exhibited for me that individual and apparent separate entities in nature are in fact somehow entwined and exhibit almost a memory of each other in a way—and that really struck me and led me to search for other “echoes” in various natural patterns in nature.
So for example in “Cue the Tears” I describe a leaf skeleton, and in my mind I could easily be describing magnified human skin. I see a great beauty in that, and the reference to seeds and trees and germination being unable to take place without union or reunion. In “Ghost Orchid” I describe a flower awaiting soil and a devastation in a way, like a calyx and corolla coaxing a wanton butterfly or a bee, heavily laden with pollen, for example, and I used this as imagery symbolizing virginity, perhaps, and the “deepening” of the flower to symbolize that kind of union.
The song “Entanglement” is an apex moment in the heart of the record—a haiku, a summit, and a minute sonic emblem of the entangled world we live in. It is specifically about quantum entanglement. Rupert Sheldrake in his books and lectures discusses the return of a more panpsychist view of the nature of reality where the entire universe is living, comprised of interconnected fields of resonance, and that the universe itself exhibits a form of conscious which again ties in with Stephen Harrod Bhuner’s writings on the evidence of learned behavior and memories in plantlife, and more recently the discovery of underground “The Woodwide Web” and the nurturing behaviour of “Mother Trees.”
Edgar Mitchell—having had an epiphany and profound sense of realization that the universe was evidently interconnected and in his mind conscious whilst he was out in space looking back at the earth at a distance whereby he could obscure it in its entirety with his thumbnail—dedicated the rest of his life to researching the true nature of reality and the science of consciousness. And having come across his studies and work and lectures I was profoundly affected yet again, and I personally see my recurrent themes around love and attachment throughout my music as a way of me exploring and describing the space between us, which it turns out may not exactly be a “space” at all. And so I believe that in a song like “Can You Hear Nature Sing?” for example, and elsewhere throughout the album, I am writing from the soil-bed of these ideas and, imho, beautiful discoveries and explorations, and it is my way of “listening” to the voice within the “silence” of Nature and expressing my part of the infinite fabric of that.
