#windborne

To Warm the Winter Hearth

I can finally reveal the big huge project that kept me super busy for the last three months!

These are two of the many (many) illustrations I painted for Windborne (@WindborneSingers and https://www.patreon.com/windborne) -a folk music group with a focus on vocal harmony across cultures and historical traditions!

To Warm the Winter Hearth is their midwinter celebration album. In their words

"In our households growing up, putting on the “holiday music” didn’t mean listening to Silver Bells or Frosty the Snowman, but instead meant albums and singing parties filled with wassails, songs of the winter solstice, old English carols, and other music you’d never hear at the mall. The focus of the holiday season was connecting to community and tradition, so the repertoire went far beyond songs and stories of the typical Christmas characters. Music came from a variety of midwinter traditions like European house-to-house visiting customs and singing back the sun on Solstice morning as we celebrated the turning of the year. "

The album (and full color book with lyrics, essays, and more art) is funding now on Backerkit: https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/windborne/to-warm-the-winter-hearth-windborne-s-album-book-of-winter-celebration

The TikTok noted they were about to tour—and were stopping in Portland in a few weeks!

We bought tickets before the song was over lol.

Anyway the concert was last night! And I bought their two most recent CD’s, which come with really lovely books full of stories and lyrics (and in one book, also the melody lines to the songs).

They’re amazing live! We really enjoyed it. They did some songs in English, but also a couple in Quebecois French and a couple in Occitan and a couple in Corsican. Oh, and one in Basque. They also did both really current stuff (like a humorous song they wrote about how little streaming services pay), and older stuff (like a song from the 1600’s about the Diggers). Just a delight.

If you like a capella voices singing leftist-leaning songs both old and new and in multiple languages, give them a listen!

Also have a bit of graffiti near the theater that I really liked:

In the Wind

Spring flowers may be beautiful, but they also spell trouble for those suffering from hay fever, a form of allergic rhinitis in reaction to pollen grains, especially from grasses (pictured, under the microscope). Climate change is exacerbating the problem, as warmer weather encourages earlier flowering, lengthening the pollen season, and higher carbon dioxide levels boost pollen production. Pollen is also carried large distances by wind, so pollen season can begin even earlier than expected. In Bavaria, Germany, scientists examining pollen records from seven groups of species over thirty years found that pre-season pollen, from plants not yet in flower locally, was common, appearing on average two weeks before the local flowering season started. Transported pollen might also come from different species, and occur at night-time as well as in the daytime, so a better understanding of pollen movements is important for more accurately predicting pollen levels, and managing allergies.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Image by A. Menzel and Y. Yuan, Technical University of Munich

Department of Life Science Systems, TUM School of Life Sciences, Technical University of Munich (TUM), Freising, Germany

Image copyright held by the original authors

Research published in Frontiers in Allergy, February 2021

swept off dunes, blown off the shore,

windborne evermore.

.

Zoe Mulford feat. Windborne