Garefowl

Garefowl is a collective of musicians (Ewan Macdonald, Chris Jones, Jess Whelligan, Nathan Bontrager, Richard O’Flynn, and Stuart Graham) who fuse acoustic instruments with electronics to create a transcendent, polyvalent take on traditional music. Centred on the human and natural heritage of the remote Scottish archipelago of St Kilda, Garefowl was conceived as a response to Ewan’s family history: a relation killed the last great auk (or “garefowl”) in the UK there in 1840 in the belief that it was a witch, and the project aims to bring an emotional dimension to the plight of endangered seabirds today.