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Reference Points is our weekly column where we get the chance to ask our favourite artists to reveal what inspires them from outside the world of music. This week, we catch up with The Magnetic North who reveal how maps and Cartography have inspired their musical creations.

“Here be dragons”

A celebration of maps

From the ancient Mappa Mundi to Grayson Perry’s ‘Map of an Englishman’ there is something very satisfying about an overview of an area or land whether it is current, historical or completely imagined. Maps have a magic all of their own.

And having spent many a childhood holiday, pissed wet through, tramping across boggy Cumbrian fells with a sodden Ordnance Survey map trying to find a path that no longer exists and ending knee deep in sheep’s entrails, you also get to see the real purpose and frustration of relying on a map to get you from A to B.

The Ancient cartographers positioned themselves at the very centre of their known worlds whether it was the Middle East, Japan or Greece because they had such a limited knowledge of what lay outside their boundaries. Each quite rightly considered himself to be at the centre of the earth. These maps seem inverted or reversed from our modern world view, with countries and continents squashed together and contorted making them almost unrecognisable.

Over the course of the Middle Ages maps gradually take a more recognisable shape as the science of cartography develops, and map makers become more accurate. Suddenly the world seems more plotted and defined. Even so this still leaves unknown areas of mystery for the traveller. The 16th century Hunt-Lenox Globe has around the east coast of Asia the phrase “Here be dragons” to denote an unexplored land inhabited with terrible creatures. And even up to the 18th and 19th century, maps of Africa show whole swathes of the continent’s interior is yet to be explored by the western map maker and hence is shown without any physical features at all.

In the 21st century GPS maps have almost replaced traditional paper maps. We are again individually and uniquely placed in the very centre of our own personal world maps. It has been suggested we now go from ‘Me to B’ instead of ‘A to B.’ The ancient map makers’ knowledge of the globe was so limited that their maps only went as far as the edges of their discovered lands, they had to imagine what lay beyond, whereas we can now cross the entire globe accurately without looking up from our phones to see the actual landscape around us.

With Erland and the Carnival we recorded a song ‘Map of Englishman’ inspired by and celebrating Grayson Perry’s playful masterpiece in which he maps out an Englishman’s brain (or his own) as an island in the style of an old Cartographers map. This experience indirectly led us on to create The Magnetic North where we took the idea of creating a musical travelogue of the Orkney Islands with each track title on the album being an actual physical place; the whole album became a kind of musical map.

For The Magnetic North artwork, we used an old hand drawn map from a 1930’s travel book so the listener could see the track names situated in the actual geography of the Islands while enjoying the music. Then with a brilliant flash of inspiration Hannah Peel suggested we make our own folded OS style maps to sell at shows. On one side we put our hand drawn 1930’s map and on the reverse, with the help of Erland’s father who very kindly wrote out his favourite local walks, we added local stories and information on the various sights and landmarks which we had gathered from Orcadian history books and other sources.

We hoped that by making our own map we would inspire people to travel to and explore the Orkney islands while listening to our album. Dozens of people, from as far away as Russia, Germany and France have already written to tell us they have made the long pilgrimage up to the ‘magnetic north’ with our CD and map in hand.

The map we have created is not the most scientifically accurate map in the world and I wouldn’t recommend relying on it to get you across a desolate moorland in a heavy fog. But then again maybe it’s good to get lost sometimes, you never know what you might find.

The Magnetic North’s new single ‘Bay of Skaill’ will be released 19 November, and the album Symphony of The Magnetic North is out now on Full Time Hobby. Catch the band at the following live dates:

November

18 – Leeds, Brudenell Social Club
22 – London, Purcell Room, Southbank Centre