Robin Williamson

The Seed-At-Zero is the first ECM album by Robin Williamson, the Scottish singer, poet and harpist who founded the Incredible String Band. It is a solo record built around the poetry of Dylan Thomas, which Williamson places in a long Welsh bardic line running from Taliesin and Llywarch Hen to Henry Vaughan. Alongside these settings he revisits some of his own strongest songs, so that four decades of his writing sit inside the same tradition.

Williamson recorded the album alone in March 2000 at Albany Productions in Cardiff, with Lawson Dando as engineer and Steve Lake producing for ECM. He accompanies himself on guitar, harp and mandolin, and several pieces are spoken or sung without accompaniment. His interest is in what he calls "wrought language", poetry worked almost like sculpture, where sound and sense carry equal weight. Thomas had occupied him before. In the mid-1980s he improvised music to Thomas's words for the stage production Prospect of the Sea.

Seven of the sixteen tracks set Thomas texts. Among them are In My Craft or Sullen Art, On No Work of Words and the eleven-minute Poem on His Birthday, the longest piece on the disc. The album opens with The World, on words by Vaughan. Later comes The Bells of Rhymney, Idris Davies's poem of the Welsh mining valleys in Pete Seeger's tune. Williamson's own Lament of the Old Man is half spoken, half sung. The closing For Mr Thomas is an older song of his, once recorded by Van Morrison, which here becomes an epitaph for the poet.

Reviewers heard the record as a recital more than a song collection. In Stereophile, Richard Lehnert wrote that its arrangements "leave ample space in which each syllable can be fully heard and savored", and called the result "incantatory". David Kidman in Traditional Music Maker heard him pull together his talents in a way "that recalls the very best work of the Incredible String Band". He also saw ECM as a way for Williamson to reach listeners beyond his usual folk audience. Williamson went on to make further albums for the label.

This is the CD edition, catalogue number ECM 1732, first released by ECM on 28 August 2000, with sixteen tracks and a running time of about 67 minutes.