Exploring the flora, fauna and inspiration behind 'Every Creeping Thing' by Simon McCorry & Wodwo

For this blog post we invited Simon McCorry and Ray Robinson (Wodwo) to chat through some of the background behind their album 'Every Creeping Thing', a collaboration which evolved as they found their way working together. Chance coincidences played a big part in shaping both the album's sound and its concepts.

There's a line in the press release which encapsulates this album particularly well; "Every Creeping Thing is a celebration of mud and moss and slugs and bugs and roots and damp – songs of the forgotten, the small, the overlooked". We asked Simon and Ray to send some images of the flora and fauna in their localities. So in this post, we've gathered most of the wonderful photos that came back, combining Simon's photos of in and around the Cotswolds with Ray's captures in Derbyshire. These are set to a video collage which serves as a mood board with three scenes, joined by the sounds of 'By the Mercury Wires' from the album.

SM: "For me, once the direction was set – I'm pretty reactive – the album kind of defined itself, I think, and went in this celebration-of-small-things kind of way… the interaction kind makes a life of its own, which is something I love."

RR: "I don't think 'concept' is the right word, but we were definitely creating a methodology as we went along... passing layers back and forth, the whole less-is-more approach, leaving enough space for the other to inhabit."

SM: "Responding, thinking of the space for the other to express what the work is…"

RR: "There was a stage, though, that we felt the album was becoming very pastoral... the topic of woodland came up a lot…"

SM: "Those three words: ‘pastoral’, ‘bubbling’, ‘mossy’. As the album grew it defined, more and more, its own direction. It’s interesting after reading your book The Mating Habits of Stags – the way you evoke landscape and how that had crept into the music. Your research for that, the foraging course, something like that has got to put you in the landscape in a very different way."

RR: "And I guess feeding our own wooden instruments through the Microcosm, which we used on every track, no?"

SM: "Yes, I think so. Everything played and recorded live, no grid, off grid."

RR: "There was definitely some organic kind of symbiosis going on... and a feeling of going from being total strangers to growing closer, in a way, though we still haven't met."

SM: "I think that’s the wonderful part in collaborating this way – it’s language at its most basic, most intrinsic."

RR: "And also, the literature connection – finding out you had epilepsy and the fact your wife had read my novel Electricity."

SM: "I’d been reading The Idiot by Dostoevsky and your thesis had been based around that."

RR: "About how Dostoyevsky used epilepsy as a structural device…"

SM: "I remember when I first moved here to Stroud, I walked loads getting lost in the various folds of the valleys spending time identifying fungi and flora obsessively. It's like my senses got clearer. Being from the city I didn't know one yellow wildflower from another, they were all dandelions, then they became hawkbit, coltsfoot, sow thistle, tansy, and so on."

RR: "And I remember you talking about the intrinsic way woodpeckers sound like the creak of trees…"

SM: "And how a crow’s craw makes me want to imitate it… just for the joy of imitating their call. To be the landscape rather than just see it, just for a moment."

'Every Creeping Thing' is available now in a highly limited run of 100 gatefold vinyl-effect CDrs and in various high-quality digital formats. You can order your physical copy (whilst stocks last) or a digital version now by clicking HERE!