STANLÆY - The Human Project (2019)

Bethany Stenning’s idea of collaboration is both more nuanced and much more ambitious than what most listeners will be used to. On The Human Project the Bath-based musician, who goes by the name of Stanlaey, has taken the idea of mixed media to its extremes: this is an album, but it is also a film; there are musicians, but there are also dancers, visual artists, actors. But even this doesn’t do justice to the scope of the project. Stenning doesn’t just collaborate with a group of fellow artists. Her concept can itself be seen as a kind of collaboration between art and the outside world: she lists her themes as ‘the dualisms that we are exposed to daily, of mind and body, idealism and materialism, organic and synthetic.’

It’s an admirably ambitious undertaking, and it would fall at the first hurdle if the songs that form the bedrock of the project were anything short of excellent. Thankfully though Stenning is a fine songwriter, and an engaging, idiosyncratic singer. The Human Project’s opening track, The Moon, sets her voice against a modernistic backdrop of muted horns and strings. Stenning’s singing will draw comparisons with Bjork, Kate Bush and Joanna Newsom but Hanna Tuulikki and Gemma Williams are probably closer to the mark.

If Stenning starts from a position of experimental folk music – and that in itself is up for debate – she soon vacates any such confines. Wooden Womb uses hand drums and flighty woodwind to evoke something that resembles CocoRosie howling through the ages to Buffy Sainte-Marie, before turning halfway through into a kind of Twin Peaks Black Lodge version of itself, darker and more fiercely experimental. That duality is explored further in Elder, where verses by rapper Pedro DG Correia nestle alongside Stenning’s vocals. Musically it is a perfectly balanced combination of jazz, chamber folk and trip-hop, while thematically and conceptually it draws on the ideas of regeneration and doubling while its melding of styles acts as a comment on the changing nature of music itself. It is living proof that exposure to varied musical cultures has an effect that enriches rather than dilutes – something we could learn from in other walks of life.

The Mountain Collector is a piece of musical psychogeography, an exploration of the human relationship with place, shot through with refreshing humour and self-awareness. Ode To Ovid delves into the past, and specifically into Ovid’s telling of the myth of the four ages of man, while exploring themes that are utterly contemporary, while Properties Of Ice is perhaps the album’s strangest and most beautiful moment – think Bjork’s Vespertine, but eerier: a twinkling, frost-bound forest of a song with a warm human heart. Aquarium showcases Stenning’s astonishing ear for musical detail – a bassline that could have come from Joni Mitchell’s Mingus, a subtly treated vocal, an otherworldly and detached kind of aggression offset by a sweetly melodic harp. Her voice, layered upon itself, heaves and swells like a tide as the song reaches its conclusion.

The Human Project can be seen as part of a larger multimedia conceit, but equally, it can stand alone, and it does so by dint of Bethany Stenning’s unique vision as a songwriter, her evident skill as a musician and arranger and her startlingly original voice. It is an ambitious, arresting and constantly interesting work of art in its own right.