Mai

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2020-03-20

Label: Bubblewrap Records

Limited to 85 copies. Comes with fold out poster / lyric sheet and download code.

On her third album, Welsh Music Prize winner Georgia Ruth returns to her roots. Having moved back to her native Aberystwyth following the birth of her son, Mai was recorded in the town’s Grade-II listed Joseph Parry Hall over the course of one week in Spring 2019. Named after the renowned composer and professor, the room was used as a venue for chamber concerts throughout the twentieth century and offered musicians a view of the sun setting over the castle as they worked.

But despite this setting, Mai (meaning May) is an intimate collection of songs. Songs written from within the depths of a house, during stolen moments. 

Songs detailing new motherhood, and the search for ritual. About being lost, and being found again. About gardens growing under doors in the depths of night. Days streaming in through a window, and the strange comfort offered by a terracotta sun hanging in a west Wales kitchen.

At its heart sits a beautiful and simple setting of Eifion Wyn’s poem - “Gwn ei ddyfod, fis y mêl”. (‘I know it’s coming, month-of-honey’). 

Mai is a meditation on finding hope and renewal in the seasons, in a world where the certainty of spring feels increasingly fragile. It is a search for wildness and love.

The album was produced with Iwan Morgan (Meilyr Jones, Cate Le Bon, Richard James) who also engineered, mixed and mastered. Additional parts were recorded at his studio in Liverpool. It features a dynamic group of musicians including Iwan and Dafydd Huws, Stephen Black, Ailsa Mair Hughes, Angharad Davies, Rhodri Brooks, and Laura J Martin. With improvised strings, pedal steel and saxophone sitting alongside harp, the album presents a sound which is both lush and sparse in turn.  

The album was recorded with support from Help Musicians, and with the generosity of Aberystwyth University.