Karine Polwart takes on life in Laws of Motion | new album and tour is touching, strident and powerful

Karine Polwart has a track record of taking on ambitious, heart-rending topics to create touching, strident, sympathetic work. Here’s news of her new album Laws of Motion, and the accompanying tour. 

Laws of Motion

Multi-award winning songwriter and musician, theatre maker and published writer Karine Polwart – six-time winner at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, including 2018 Folk Singer of The Year – will release a new album, Laws of Motion, on October 19, 2018 along with which is a 13-date tour that just so happens to pop into Exeter.

A Pocket of Wind Resistance

Karine’s seventh release, Laws of Motion is the follow-up to 2017’s much-praised A Pocket of Wind Resistance, which earned Karine & co-writer Pippa Murphy a New Music Scotland Award for its innovative blend of folk music, spoken word & sound design, alongside a nomination for the Radio 2 Folk Album of The Year.

The new album – recorded alongside long-term collaborators Inge Thomson (accordion) and brother Steven Polwart (guitars).

The familial and the familiar  alongside the foreign and the frightening

Across Laws of Motion, Karine the familial and the familiar sit effortlessly alongside the foreign, the frightening and the unknown, driven as ever by her gift for empathy and accessibility.

Subject matter as disparate as Trump, WW2 & holocaust survivors are drawn together by the laws of the album’s title alongside the experiences of Japanese migrants and allegorical folk & children’s stories.

Speaking about the album’s broad focus, Karine says; “I didn’t set out to write songs on a unified theme – they’ve just landed that way. Perhaps that’s no surprise, given the times we’re in.”

The times we’re in

Laws of Motion features amongst its track-listing a clutch songs which Karine originally wrote with her friend (and Midlothian neighbour) Martin Green, of visionary folk trio Lau.

‘Suitcase’ and the smouldering, stirring album title track (which Polwart dedicates here to the UNESCO Chair of Refugee Integration Through Language & The Arts) were both recorded in different iterations (with vocals contributed by Becky Unthank and Aidan Moffatt) for Green’s 2016 multi-media project on social migration, ‘Flit’.

The Kindertransport

The quietly urgent ‘Suitcase’ was written by Karine as testament to all who used – and sustained – the Kindertransport, the underground network which smuggled mostly Jewish children out of Nazi Europe in the run up to WW2. Karine adds; “It’s also dedicated to all those who flee still, because they have to.”

‘I Burn But I am Not Consumed’ takes the clan motto of Donald Trump’s maternal Scottish family as its title, deflating the POTUS’s blustery posturing in the process.

In an age with no shortage of artists taking aim at The White House’s incumbent, Karine is presumably the first – and perhaps the only – to do so via the voice of the ancient rock beneath the Isle of Lewis, birthplace of Trump’s mother, Mary Ann Macleod.

Trump: “a broken boy ”

It’s anything but twee – lamenting a wayward island son, “a broken boy”, Karine skewers Trump’s narcissism with both precision and humour (“In the name of progress, profit and executive golf / He would pit himself against time & tide”), whilst retaining the vestiges of his humanity.

The album comes to a spine-tingling close with ‘Cassiopeia’, in which the unimaginable concept of nuclear warfare rubs uncomfortably against a young Karine’s fearful grasp of the wider world beyond her childhood perimeters – “When the siren sounds above the BP at Grangemouth / We’re gonna hide in the jam cupboard”.

Protect and Survive

The track intersperses snippets from the Protect and Survive radio broadcasts issued by the Home Office during the Cold War with the fearful, unanswerable questions of a 9 year old – “How far is it from Leningrad to Bonnybridge?” – all delivered in the richly evocative speaking voice which gives Polwart’s music so much of its warmth.

Laws of Motion is the latest in an evolving series of collaborative projects across which Karine has combined music & storytelling with politics & environmental-societal issues.

Theatre debut

Karine wrote A Pocket Of Wind Resistance (a Songlines & BBC Radio 3 Late Junction Album Of The Year as well as SAY Award short listed) as a musical companion to her critically acclaimed theatre debut Wind Resistance, now published via Faber & Faber and selected by Robert McFarlane as a Guardian Book of 2017.

The production, which debuted at the Edinburgh International Festival with a residency at the Lyceum, was written, musically directed and performed by Karine, winning her the Best Music and Sound Award at the 2017 CATS. Alongside three other nominations, it also placed Karine on the shortlist for the Best Actor ‘Scottish Oscar’ in the Sunday Herald Culture Awards.

Over the last 3 years, Karine has also worked with indie composer RM Hubbert, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and Greek Cypriot composer Alkinoos Ioannidis. She also co-directed the acclaimed Pilgrimer, novelist James Robertson’s ode to Joni Mitchell.

Karine Polwart | Facebook | Twitter: @IAMKP

UK Tour Dates

17/10/18 – Cadogan Hall, LONDON

18/10/18 – Wedgewood Rooms, PORTSMOUTH

19/10/18 – The Arts Centre,PONTARDAWE

20/09/18 – RNCM, MANCHESTER

21/10/18 – The Phoenix, EXETER

22/10/18 – Komedia, BRIGHTON

23/10/18 – Junction, CAMBRIDGE

24/10/18 – City Varieties, LEEDS

31/10/18 – Walker Theatre, SHREWSBURY

01/11/18 – St Georges, BRISTOL

02/11/18 – Town Hall, BIRMINGHAM

03/11/18 – Brewery Arts Centre, KENDAL

04/11/18 – The Sage, GATESHEAD