Track By Track: A Grave With No Name on Wooden Mask

Following on from 2015's stunning Feathers Wet, Under The Moon, Wooden Mask was recorded over a winter at London’s Holy Mountain Studios and is a subtle masterclass in atmospheric song-writing. Both brittle and beaufiful, the record goes some way to mark out Shields as one of the UK's most vastly underrated talents.

Below, you can stream the album alongside a track by track commentary from Alexander. Be sure to mark August 18 down in your diary as A Grave With No Name bring the beautiful fragility of Wooden Mask to the live stage at London's Servant Jazz Quarters.

"My intention with Wooden Mask was to write a record intertwining the personal with the universal, and the everyday with the transcendent. I recorded my previous album Feathers Wet, Under the Moon with a revolving cast of musicians in Nashville, so for Wooden Mask I took the opposite approach, booking a studio within walking distance of my home, and performing as much as possible myself. Alongside the producer Misha Hering, the only other continuous presence in the studio was my childhood friend Daniel Paton who handled the drums throughout the record. My intention was to create something free from unnecessary decoration, to allow it to speak into the heart of things."

Sword

"Lyrically and musically ‘Sword’ set the template for the rest of the album. I was keen to set the scene with a few well-chosen words, but then leave enough space so the listener would have room to explore. I set out to make a heavy-sounding album, and along with the Misha, we realised that the best way of accomplishing this was to strip the arrangements down to the bone."

Mask

"During the period I was writing the album, I was reading heavily about masks, and the roles they have played in different cultures throughout history. Amongst other things, they have been used as a means of making the supernatural world visible; as disguises; as a connection between art and ceremony, and to signify transition of form. The key to every mask is to give it life."

Mist

"Whilst walking during a holiday in the remote countryside, I came across a derelict castle, and nearby lay a lamb’s leg, violently ripped from its owner’s body by an unknown act of violence. The scene felt elemental, because it was so far removed from my day-to-day existence. The crumbling castle, the lamb’s leg, and the insects swarming over it, all seemed to denote a natural cycle that this song seeks to explore."

Shrine

"In the past, every part of my songs had been rigidly composed, however, since my previous album ‘Feathers Wet, Under the Moon’, I have been introducing freer moments and improvisation. My friend James, from the band Trailer Trash Tracys dropped by the studio with a weird pedal which cuts the attack off the guitar signal, which he used whilst I was creating heavy drones, and Daniel played drums way off grid. The producer Misha is really into drone metal, and Daniel comes from a jazz background, so they both really dug this track."

Wedding Dress

"I was listening to ‘On the Beach’ by Neil Young, and reading William Faulkner’s ‘Sanctuary’ when I wrote ‘Wedding Dress’, and I just pushed those two things together to create the song. The line about “a hand beneath the water” came to from me staring at the front cover of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Matt Sweeney’s ‘Superwolf’ LP."

Pirouette

"Unlike with my recent albums, I didn’t send the producer any demos of the songs on ‘Wooden Mask’ in advance of recording. On the morning of the first day of studio, I was going through my 8-track recorder trying to find the demos of the songs for reference, when I unearthed ‘Pirouette’ – a song that I had forgotten recording. It became an eleventh hour addition to the album, and the first song we tracked for the project."

House

"‘House’ explores the frailty of our domestic lives in the context of the natural order. Humans build homes, decorate them, and then hide within them hoping to find equilibrium, but it’s an equilibrium that is precarious at best. Domesticity in any of its forms can be completely destroyed by numerous factors such as death, illness, natural disasters, and economic forces to name but a few. It’s odd to think we lock ourselves in our homes, and then vainly hope not to be disrupted for as long as possible, but there’s also a romance in that kind of behaviour, which this song explores."

Pelt

"‘Pelt’ is a reference to the experimental group of the same name who make Appalachian-inspired drone music. This track was an attempt to fuse some of their creative approach with a black metal influence taken from bands such as Agalloch. In context of the record’s narrative, I then thought it would be interesting to push this sinister passage against the familial scene that appears in the following song ‘Nest’."

Nest

"Each summer, my sister and I join my parents on a family holiday. Last year my mother showed me a nest built on a house where some baby starlings had just hatched. Their mother would tend to them each day to provide them with food and care. We’d go to visit them each morning, and every day I would expect them no longer to be there. I couldn’t help but draw comparisons with the temporary family nest we had created for ourselves."

Black Sage Pt.II

"My friend Melanie Coles, a visual artist, asked me to create the soundtrack for her installation ‘Black Sage’ about the strange happenings in her hometown of Oliver, Canada – a place that seems impossibly close to a real life Twin Peaks. Her mother, who still lives there, collected field recordings from around town, and I wrote guitar motifs to accompany them along with Melanie’s stories and pictures. ‘Black Sage Pt.II’ re-appropriates one of those guitar pieces and places it in the new context of ‘Wooden Mask’’s narrative."

Storm

"I view ‘Wooden Mask’ as a heavy album, but its heaviness is displayed in its mood, themes and the brutal starkness of its arrangements, rather than it being sonically aggressive. I liked the idea of abruptly disrupting the meditative quality of the record towards its end with an uncharacteristically loud and dense piece, piling layers of sound and noise upon each other where none had been before."

I Set Fire to My Boat

"If the creative approach Misha and I took in the studio to create the album’s sound could be summed up, it would be: “what can we not put here?”. I think this song is perhaps the best example of that. It’s nothing more than a couple of chords, barely-there drums, and a vocal, but the picture it paints is much larger."

Tape

"I released the soundtrack to my friend Melanie’s ‘Black Sage’ installation on cassette. I had an old tape player that I noticed was slowly breaking, and warping the tapes as it played. I decided to record the results of the busted tape deck playing a passage from the soundtrack, and in the process of capturing this my last copy of the cassette was chewed up and destroyed, which made for a perfect ending to the album."

Wooden Masks is released through Forged Artifacts on August 12.