Hedera are a band of five tightly knit friends – violinist Lulu Austin, violin/viola player Maisie Brett, violinist/double bassist Beth Roberts, accordionist/harpist Tamsin Elliott, and clarinettist Isis Wolf-Light – named after the Latin botanical term for ivy. The group’s debut album combines influences from Bulgaria to Bali, Ireland to Georgia, and establishes its mood of knotted, hypnotic locked groove from its opening track, Sterretjie (named after an Afrikaans word for the coastal tern bird, which also means “little stars”). Brett’s violin passes the track’s melody to Wolf-Light’s clarinet and Elliott’s accordion with a bright, sparkling swiftness.
Many other moments of joy, lithe and spring-like, lift these 12 tracks. Roberts’ waltz about a Cornish meadow, Mayflies in June, travels from minor key to major and back again, buoyed along by Elliott’s harp-playing. (Elliott similarly impressed on 2023’s So Far We Have Come, her Anglo-Egyptian album with oud player Tarek Elazhary.) Sekar Jagat (Balinese for “flower of the universe”) twitches sweetly into life on prepared harp and plucked strings, then makes hay with a melody originally written for gamelan; on Shen Khar Venakhi, a 1,000-year-old Georgian hymn that survived Soviet purges, all five women’s voices join together in a dense, glowing mass.
