#16 Sam Lee: Folk, Conservation and Singing with Nightingales

0:00We spend about 45 minutes to an hour with nightingales. Every night a different musician joins me. It's telling their story of extinction because they'll be extinct in my lifetime here. And that's an extraordinary concept. This is palliative care. What we're doing is saying thank you to these birds for the thousands of years that they've sung for us and taught us how to be humans. We're now singing them away.

0:25Sam Lee:Welcome to The Slowdown. Your time to define success and growth on your own terms with a little inspiration from others. I was joined today for my final episode of season two by an incredibly special human. I heard Sam before I saw him in the great hall of a castle somewhere in Poland where I went for an experience design course. His incredible voice filled the room and sent chills through my whole body. Sam Lee is a musician, a collector of folklore and a conservationist. Renowned for his rich baritone voice and a commitment to preserving traditional songs, Sam's work bridges the gap between ancient folklore traditions and contemporary audiences, fostering a deeper appreciation for cultural heritage and environmental stewardship.

1:09Sam Lee:For me, Sam is a reminder of the importance of great stories to slow us down, make us present in the moment and appreciate the natural world around us. So much so that we are moved into action. I hope you enjoy this episode.

1:27Sam Lee:Hi Sam. Hello. I'm so glad you could join me for what is the final episode of my recording of season two. I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you for having me. What an exit for a season. Every moment that I get to spend time with you is always such a delight. This is not the first time we've met. It's not the first time. It's the smallest space that we've ever met in though, I think. Yes, we're normally in the great outdoors. Yeah, or a castle. Or a castle. Yeah. We'll make do. You are a Mercury Prize nominated musician currently on album four, a storyteller, song collector and conservationist whose work bridges folk traditions with contemporary soundscapes.

2:06Sam Lee:You're also the founder of Nest Collective, an organization dedicated to revitalizing folk music and connecting people to nature through cultural experiences. You explore how music can be a form of slowing down, deep listening and reconnecting with the rhythms of life. In 2021, you released a debut novel, The Nightingale, Notes on a Songbird, telling the epic tale of the highly endangered bird and their place in culture, folklore, music and literature. you're also regular on radio and tv you've composed soundtracks for several films and supported a number of non-profits most people i speak to i'm hearing them tell a story of following a masculine path of success that had been laid out for them by capitalist culture which leads them to a burnout and a reckoning and a decision to dramatically change their lives but i feel like you kind of are mr slowdown so it's my duty to really pull out the wisdom and the tools from you like i want to learn i'm also so impressed by your work thank you wow that was almost awkward listening to that and i love how it looks on the outside of the inside i'm not the kind of calmest i'm totally adhd my brain is racing my work is my my therapy so the more i do of it the more i pack in what each day of whatever it is i do the slower i am um so i it's i i do it for myself because i'd probably fall apart if i didn't well i'd like to start from the start where were you raised and by whom and what was your childhood like well i am a londoner born and raised kentish town other side of the river from where we are inner city kid raised by my two parents who are still around and are still raising me uh in so many ways um and i'm a product of several communities and places we all are we're all you know come out in response to our place of birth and experience and london has had a very very big impact on me i'm a devoted londoner but I love London because it's shaped the appreciation for nature as well.

4:30It's provided a lot of places of green and exploration and curiosity within that passion of mine but it's also a cultural nexus and so I've been raised by the multiple worlds and cultures that have existed here and found sanctuary in London. so mum dad London that were those are my three parents and how did you get access to some nature Hampstead Heath the back of my garden which is a little you know tiny little thing in in North London being sent off as a kid on these charity summer camps which I'm still very involved with forest school camps just getting my bicycle and going and finding places and friends that were so really into it and some great mentors and teachers who as I got older spotted that I had a great affinity with nature it was it was a place of of sanctuary for me and I just found my way my parents were very good at just kind of it's the 80s they're like yeah go off for the day and you know you're only nine but you'll be fine um and so I did lots of sort of just being in my own space in my own way discovering and learning climbing trees eating wild things and when did

5:47Sam Lee:you first start to realize what you might want to do in the world be in the world yeah I'm still trying to work that out you know it's an ever question that um I I've done many things I've been lucky to have been a jack of all trades and tried out my hand at so many things I went to art school which that treat teaches you entrepreneurialism opportunity finding um ingenuity I was a dancer I was a photographer I was a Japanese lacquerer I'm like kind of jokingly done so many different crazy things uh I wasn't a musician until kind of my mid late 20s um didn't release my first album until I was 32 so that came much later but allowed me the opportunity to explore where my wanting to make a comment on the world around me could be expressed best.

6:46Sam Lee:And where, at what point did folklore and folk song enter your orbit? Yes, quite young. So I was singing folk songs unknowingly around the campfire in the summer with this organisation. Didn't know they were folk songs, but I just knew that they weren't songs that you would hear anywhere else outside of those fireside circles. It wasn't until my 20s that I discovered that these were songs that had some sort of ancient lineage I trained I studied anthropology I was very interested in indigenous cultures and subsistence and relationship to nature within many different tribal communities from around the world and they all had music and music was part of their devotional practice and then suddenly there was this moment I was oh my god Britain has its own indigenous devotional secular slash sacred song which is part of our ancestry these songs have exactly the same purpose and so when i discovered this i just it was a falling down the well of that music that that more than just the music the culture the customs the whole ideas of what identity means and lineage and ethnicity sovereignty all these kind of complex terms that one doesn't think that you know we have but actually Britain is abundant in phenomenal different regional variations and legacies of old ways and old orders that have been passed down through the generations.

8:13And the thing that attracted me to them were a lot of them about marking the calendar, seasonal change, kind of ancient atavistic ceremonies, you know, May Day, there's equinoxes, the solstices, all sorts of other very curious points that have once held great significance for our ancestors for one reason or another and ultimately it's all down to nature it's all about you know the cycles of life because once upon a time we depended very much in a very subsistent like way on nature providing so we had to sing and dance and praise in service to that i was fascinated by this and see it now is highly relevant because even though we've outsourced we are still utterly dependent three times a day on nature to keep us alive and this is oral history and and something

9:12Sam Lee:that is quite difficult to pin down and catalogue and chronicle and you felt called to kind of starting to catalogue some of this did that feel like a huge task yeah well i didn't know what the task was until i started i think what came about was that i fell in love with these songs i was listening to these old recordings and of farmers and seafarers and you know old housewives in their 80s and where were you listening where was this available in the archive in the english folk dance and song society up in camden sessil sharp house in that library there i found this place it wasn't far from where i grew up very conveniently and went and volunteered there and started doing jobs and getting paid to be in there and do projects and and i love these recordings and i was obsessed with them because they were so real and authentic they weren't professional singers singing for money or fame or celebrity they were people singing for their life about music that their grandparents and great-grandparents had sung and whole different concepts of how music what the role of music is in this instance but they're all dead they'd all gone they'd all been recorded and long died i was like who are these people where are these roots that we have it can't all have finished and all the academics and the librarians and the the folklorists were like no those days are gone those old singers they've long passed we've lost our connection to the rural culture and i was like damn it's not true they've got to be and i was 20 like five and then of course i met my first had my first connection with one of these elders who was still alive from the scottish traveler community Stanley Robertson who took me on as his apprentice and inducted me into the ancient arts of singing from the balladic repertoire from an ancient thousands of year old tradition it's kind of a shamanic teaching in that sense how did you find him or him find you did you seek him out or was I knew of him I'd learned some of his songs from recordings thinking he was dead and then i went to a folk festival in whitby yorkshire and he was there he was there singing and i was like holy crap that's he lives and he lives and his lineage is one of the most revered of the british you know singing traditions and storytelling traditions his family were really the greatest singers ever recorded in this country in that repertoire so it was like wow and he knew who I was we never met I wasn't having it and have any reputation but he was the travelers deeply psychic knew my name knew where I was meant to be going knew my entire life's journey told it to me instantly handed me a cassette saying I've been waiting for you here's some songs learn them and I was like which is how do you know my name and who I am he goes I've been waiting for you and uh there began an extraordinary kind of slightly tolkien-esque um yeah apprenticeship i still wear his ring the ballad ring wow and uh and i carry that responsibility of being as the ring is called the keeper of the law of the robertson balladic and tradition and that spirit more importantly not just the songs but the the responsibility the quality of which you hold and respect the songs that was for me the greatest teaching i then went off and searching for other singers and met hundreds of irish travelers and english gypsies and recorded many many people with extraordinary songs some of which prolific repertoires all of whom have passed on now pretty much um but stanley was always the kind of the great teacher because he was the person with with the i think the deepest sort of soul and understanding of the there's almost supernatural power of these songs well i mean the pessimist in me is like does he have a cassette every day for every kid and he hopes that one of them might he did teach a lot of people he you know he was when he was discovered they realized that he was a it was like finding a sort of you know an old medicine man in the forest you still had all the the powers and the spells and very quickly he was brought in as an old man into the Aberdeen University and became a teacher and professor and he taught history culture you know talked about the traveler culture the traveler language they're very very ancient pre-celtic community but he'd never had an apprentice he'd never had a kind of next of kin as it were he had children but they weren't going to go and be singers he saw me as somebody he could be a the sort of next generation to carry his his material and his memory wow and then what did you do with all of this well song well firstly he had to die because that's always part of the the journey with these yeah it wouldn't be tolkien if no we lost him in 2009 and uh that was a you know a great shock i had four and a bit years you know with him and then I realized okay it's my turn to step into that place of what do I do with these songs I can sing them I'm beginning to understand what it means to be a singer record an album so I and I needed him to not be there in a way maybe before I could actually make my first artistic statement with these songs so I made an album my first album which came out in 2012 called Ground of Its Own with with some songs of his on and um yeah it got nominated for the mercury which meant that very quickly very quickly i was thrust from kind of nobody having done you know a handful of gigs myself not really even having a proper band to suddenly on the main stage going okay i'm in the fast lane and uh but i was ready for it because i like the fast lane well the music industry is an interesting one right like how were you able to manage that relationship of the industry wanting you probably to release another album immediately afterwards and so on and your own kind of personality and wishes and other aspirations and goals because as you said jack of all trades you have so many other kind of white i feel like music is like one of the mediums that you use and one of the vehicles that you use for a wider message it's not the only way that you choose to communicate indeed well the hardest thing for an artist is often finding opportunities to be creative that's it you know like i could have spent a life just sort of writing emails people going would you book me for a gig and and uh can i can play at this pub or this back room here and actually the great gift was that suddenly i had to be an artist i had to sing i had to go and do lots of gigs i had to create a band understand what being a live performer is being a teller of story how one communicates these what the unique thing that i'd gathered with these songs and experiences how does one retell that on the live stage and and arrange songs to capture the identity of these songs their lineage and respect the singers and the journeys that the songs have been on before they came to me and then at the same time put on a good show and you know that was an amazing gift and training and I traveled the world and then yes had to go and make record new songs and for me the you know the songs are always unaccompanied that's the important thing just one singer one song no instrumentation at all but I was very keen that the sonic packaging the sonic arrangement of these songs was not looking into what English folk sounds like twiddly d violins and guitars and but actually how could it be a more worldly incorporating textual concepts and improvised ideas from many different cultures and traditions root the songs in a new identity and a contemporary sound that might be and that's you know that was very that was appreciated because folk music hadn't really very often been challenged in that way it always sounded exactly the way it used to sound so my calling was to go and be creative and that's brilliant but that takes its own handling of how does one balance all these things that one wants to do and express and how to take folk music and build it higher and higher and you know have more people appreciate it and connect with this you know as i called it the the music that dare not speak its name and how did the nest collective enter the frame so we're the day we're recording this uh was the is the day after the 20th anniversary of when it started so it started congratulations 20 years ago me and the co-founder went for dinner last night joe who runs a wonderful festival called fire on the mountain which has been very successful we just started putting music on in the top of a pub in islington and it became very popular and suddenly we're doing it more and more and and the magpie's nest then became the nest collective went on its journey as of this month i've actually stepped down from that organization of 20 years and i've let let go and i'm moving on to focus on both my music and my environmental work but that was just about creating a space for for music that both borrowed from the old folk club traditions which was a huge thing in the 1950s and 60s and started to wane in the 70s till it went almost kind of you know underground borrowing some of that intimacy and that musical sharing with you know contemporary live promotings and i wanted to take them out concerts out in outside around the fire being in extraordinary unusual places.

18:57So the journey was always about trying to find the weirdest, most wonderful locations to have concerts in instead of going into your presumed venues. So they were immersive, but they were also about what the quality of listening, how important that is. Always the spaces that I made were places where people didn't talk over the music. They sat and the artists and the audience were in conversation. there was none of the fourth wall this kind of separation for me it was always about breaking that bringing everyone together and I think that's so important and it's now so much more common and you know immersive theatre experiences are always doing that integration of the art into the human space and the audience into the you know into the performing space I really love that

19:49Sam Lee:So I actually don't have a sponsor and there aren't any commercial breaks in this season Instead, I wanted to use this little pause to say how much we would love to hear from you. We want to get to know our audience better. There are lots of different ways to practice slowing down and lots of different people and stories we can hear from. So please leave a comment or a review on this episode to share your thoughts. Tools you use to slow down, someone you'd like to suggest for the show, or just your thoughts on the episode. This really helps us plan future episodes and cover things that you might be interested in.

20:20Sam Lee:Now, back to the show.

20:25Sam Lee:I feel like there is a natural progression from all of this to the experience that I shared with you last year. So I joined somewhere near Hastings, a event that you hosted called Singing with Nightingales, where it's a immersive sensory story, song experience in nature. How did the idea for that come about and the kind of design story for that come about? Because it's, it's such a kind of masterclass in you don't need much money to create an incredibly immersive experience that not just is enjoyable and fascinating and interesting and you learn something new but moves people into action and that's what you obviously want from conservation and environmentalism wow so lots of questions there and um and the way i'll answer it is that what I have created over 10 years this is our 10th year I'm just about to go back into the woods in a couple of weeks is a coming together of everything I've shared about creating a space for music and deeper listening the my passion for nature growing growing up with nature connection as part of my practice and how do I as a teacher create experiences and workshops ideas and practices and techniques for sensory awareness opening a deeper listening deeper deeper feeling deeper peripheral opening of peripheral vision and peripheral hearing and the other senses the beyond the the immediate five senses how do you bring all these principles and ideas into an evening's immersion and it came about because as a lover of nature in the night and the dark i've been introduced to nightingales i'd learned about this extraordinary bird i've been listening to them for some years they sing at night from you know from after dusk through the night into dawn um very unusual very prolific bird very enmeshed within ancient culture folklore mythology poetry you know they've been the muse for artists for millennia literally thousands of years i was captivated by them but didn't know that when one went up to one and when i go up to one i mean like really close when they're singing their courtship song at night and you sing with them they sing back they accept you and they're aware of you and they will they will adapt their song in accordance with you and come into key and do all sorts of extraordinary things and it happened to me when I was making a documentary for Radio 4 for the BBC about nightingales.

23:07While doing this, singing with the birds that I'd never done, you know, never thought to even get close to them. I didn't realise you can literally be like 10 feet away and they will just sit there in their bush singing away. They're so desperate for sex. Nothing will scare them off. And me and the musicians were just like, what's going on? And it was a kind of, you know, damascene moment. it was like my god this is this is the theater right here you can't bring these birds into the the auditorium let's make the auditorium here so the next year i you know proposed it to brighton festival in fact a wonderful commissioning festival for for the arts do a lot of immersive work and they were like love it let's do this don't know what it is let's try it out and i did a kind of prototype with them it sold out in 20 minutes all the tickets well and then i was like can i carry on with it do it next year and they were like sure so next year there i was cooking dinner for everyone every night you know 25 people came and now it's grown into 1500 people a year

24:09Sam Lee:um 40 people a night and there's a specific window yeah just mid-april to end of may that's when they sing the males sing after that they like they've mated or they've had enough yeah they've lost their chances so um we're in that window we go and do this and we spend about 45 minutes to an hour with the birds um every night a different musician joins me it's and it's all leading up to this moment where we sit in their company in the dark in complete silence with this prolific improviser singer and but it's telling their story of extinction because they are declining rapidly their red list endangered in this country they'll be extinct in my lifetime here we will be the last generation to have heard this bird in england and that's an extraordinary concept and i think something that we aren't conceiving yet in our understanding of what the ecological crisis really means what it feels like what it sounds like what that poverty of of natural resilience and abundance that is disappearing fast and they are the kind of i would say the canary in the coal mine so it's telling that story so that when we go and visit the bird um we've fallen in love with them because we've realized how incredible they are because we've sang the songs we've told their story around the fire and then it's the kind of well actually this is palliative care what we're doing is saying thank you to these birds for the thousands of years that they've sung for us and taught us how to be humans we're now singing them away and that's a story that is not easy to to swallow but at the same time it's exceptionally beautiful so for me it's part of the wider campaign of how can we bring about greater ecological understanding justice and appreciation for our natural natural world what are your hopes for these projects like what do you hope people go away and do well my hope is for the deepest impact possible i'm not going in for light entertainment here this is transformation work as all art should be in some way or another it's many things and it's many things for many people and I don't often want to dictate what should be received or people should expect.

26:36Some people it's just wonderful and joyful. Others it's funny and weird and quirky. Others it's deeply painful. As grief comes up for a lot of people, there can be massive tears. I get essays sent to me the day after from people saying, you know, this has changed my life. It responds so wildly differently because that's the beauty of humans what it has at its heart is about trying to be a place of change making so there is a whole aftercare thing and things at the night that i offer about ways that we can adapt in our own day-to-day lives to be more ecologically positively impactful simple things i won't share them all now but you know they're gestures that we can to make ourselves healthier happier um more connected more nature aware more community based it's a community event we sit there in circles and strangers meet each other and go through these this journey together so it's yeah it's very open-ended at the same time it has very clear intentions and we're just at the moment we're about to launch our 10-year forward vision of what this work does how this can be a an opportunity for um yeah for a shift a societal shift

28:05Sam Lee:and how do you choose your projects because i would imagine that people come to have this experience you must get pulled in a hundred different directions people must say oh sam we want you to do this and or there's so many animals in need and so much of nature that requires support and i imagine you get requests left right and center i i do and i don't that the the beautiful thing is i'm not an ecologist although i have a passion for nature and i'm you know a bit boringly scientific about it sometimes and fascinated by you know the knowledge i'm also not i'm an artist at heart and an artist is is to find myself in places where the creative opportunity or potential reveals itself you can't just go up to any old bird and do this like so specific to the nightingale thing they have they have presented their opportunity and I've built this around them.

28:56And there are other species that I do work with and have worked with. The turtle dove, one of the rarest birds in this country. Salmon, also a keystone species about to go extinct.

29:09Sam Lee:Not big singers, salmon? No, but story carriers and liminal wisdom keepers and phenomenal species that defies so many things that they live for their life in the ocean. five six years and then swim up back into the river from which they came having gone out into the atlantic and beyond come back to the very river which they were born in so it's telling their stories about us realizing that a salmon isn't just something you have with cream cheese it's a phenomenal species that is going extinct because of our torturing of the land you know how do we start to think about what the consequences of our actions basically but also how do we start to bring music and creativity back into the natural world and also back into ourselves so it's not just me the the professional doing it but everyone is able to participate and i think when we start being offered that both permission and empowerment people start to realize that oh i'm in love with this and also i want to protect this because you can't protect what you don't love I think that that was yeah one of the biggest takeaways that I had from the experience that I had with you which was I just did not know enough about the nightingale and having it be sort of taught and shared in such a beautiful and memorable way you know think about it regularly you know that that experience well thank you for hosting it I mean wow what a gift yeah it's very lovely to hear that and i appreciate you sharing i i also want to stress that the nightingale is like it's the bait but it's the kind of like it's not really about the nightingale although you know although they're the star of the show we're all like you know yeah your top billing nightingale it's an entryway it's a gateway into exactly everything from before you eat a meal slow down think about what you're eating be grateful for what you're eating think about where it comes from I think I see so many people who just consume at such a fast pace without any consideration for where things come from, how things are made, like any of that stuff.

31:23Sam Lee:So there's, yeah, it's a gateway into a much, much wider conversation. With all these like wonderful things that you do and with being an artist, obviously taking up a certain amount of headspace. Do you have any tools, tips or tricks to slow down in your micro in your day to day? uh well it's really funny that one because i everyone finds their own tools and what works for me might not work for you i love being outside i love listening to like this morning the birds have just been singing so strongly sitting on my doorstep in the sunshine it's just phenomenal um i love swimming lots of you know that those are some of my little routines but actually i'm for me singing i just you know it sounds obvious i'm a singer it's not like you know but just like collectively as well singing with other people that is my that's my prayer that's my gesture of like re-rooting rewiring once i've been singing i'm just always like so grounded and centered and buzzing i come off stage when i've done a gig and some people like really kind of like the adrenaline I'm like zenned out I can literally go straight walk off stage to go straight to bed and fall asleep it's really funny how that settles and aligns and yeah but you mentioned these ballads and um your kind of mentor and the um folk song that you found is there one that remains perhaps it was one of his as a real song that you return to and would you mind seeing i'll sing i'll sing a little bit actually i'll sing a little bit of one that's not his oldest it's not his most complex narrative it's um but it's a love song for the land um and it was from he learned it stanley learned it from his aunt muggy muggy stewart who was an old traveler who never wore a pair of shoes in her entire life and had hair down to her ankles.

33:29She lived, you know, in the wind. And I've heard her voice and I never met her. And the song is called Moloch Magi and it's a kind of devotional song both to the land, to this woman Magi, but also perhaps the land embodied in her. I'll just sing a couple of verses. It's a very ethereal tune. So yeah, this is Moloch Magi. And do you see, love, yon flock of sheep? One hundred must I own, but two or three. And I'll grant them all to My Mawlog Maggie If she consents for To gang with me To give consent and love I dare not give To herd your sheep high On yon heathery hill And I'll ground them all to My mole of Maggie If she consents for To gang with me

35:42Sam Lee:thank you so much that's just one verse i've heard you sing in some interesting environments first time was in a castle in poland i heard you before i saw you or met you which was interesting and i was just mesmerized and it's not something that's so common in our society to as you say just hear someone sing no no accompaniments no other instrument no piano backing guitar just to stand and sing I would think that requires such a confidence do you did you develop this confidence or or is that not how you see it I don't see it like that because the tradition from which I've come and where my my kind of apprenticeship and training was that's how it was done and very quickly I realized there was an extraordinary beauty and rarity in that as you say it allowed for such deeper listening for such attunement and channeling to to hear a singer sing like that and these songs actually it's like seeing a an animal in its wild habitat when you see it in a you know dressed up in you know doggy outfit in a in a dog cage you're like that's not really how that animal should be what we done to it i feel like that with the songs a little bit bad analogy but yeah i get what you mean yeah and what do you think is the place for folk song in our everywhere everywhere they're songs that speak about every part of our lives they tell the stories that we are going to encounter once again you know of what grief and tragedy and torture the same problems yeah we've always had we will continue to have just on a slightly different scale so my hope for folk music is that it perseveres that it evolves that it finds nourishment and nutrition in the times ahead of us and could be part of the guidance that we we need because where are we really getting our sort of yeah our compasses our moral compasses tuned in tuned up from these days so there that's what they're there for they're about holding us to ourselves to account i love that and you're also very knowledgeable about birdsong when did you actually learn as a kid from Camden about all of these birds and exactly you know we did that walk together and it was like oh that's that bird and that's that bird you just get used to it like you walk down the high street and you see brands and logos and you're like oh that's and that it's it's the same our brains are made to read and identify that's how we have become the you know brilliant beings that we are to inventorize and identify and i just know what bird is there's so much more depth i know people who can listen you know i know what bird that is and i know exactly what he or she is saying and what's going on around them and what other birds are saying to that bird through what they're saying you know there is a language a very very very big language out there i'm just skimming the surface but to to learn and attune to something like that you have to spend a considerable amount of time in nature how do you split your time currently between your london home and being in nature and learning all of these things yeah it's not a perfect balance i do what i can get out when i can luckily the nightingales puts me for eight weeks living in the woods yeah so that helps yeah so i get a very intense dose at the beginning of this season and after that i'm like buzzing so it kind of sees me through and the summers you know musicians are at festivals i do a lot of outdoor work i do wilderness guiding i take people on expeditions to romania and northern spain and places so i've made it part of my career and opportunity because that allows me to get and be be out in these places too well my final question um which i ask everybody and i feel like you might have an interesting answer is if i had to watch one film or read one book or see one piece of art that would help me better understand you provide some more context to you what would it be it's a lovely question that i'm thinking of films right now i tell you what i'm gonna answer this is a very random one because very inspiring for me when I was studying anthropology and good luck trying to find them but the anthropological films that were made by the Canadian film board in the 1970s 1974 by a filmmaker called Issan Balixi and he followed the northern polar indigenous communities on their year-round life cycle of hunter gathering and it was the year before they were forcibly settled into homes and taken off the land and it was this incredible and extensive documentation of their life and for me it was this beautiful illustration of a tough but also expressive and deeply quiet and attuned listening to nature hunting killing it eating it but always with such respect so yeah those films by Issan Bilixi and they are filmed in colour which is extraordinary big project beautiful work thank you so much Sam thank you for having me thank you for your time and for your song thanks for asking thank you for tuning in this episode was hosted and created by me Tiana Tambridge it's produced by Whitney Rosenthal sound and video recording mixing editing and mastering is by brazen studios cover art designed by natalia ruhe please subscribe to the slowdown to be notified of upcoming episodes tell a friend and leave a review because it really helps a new podcast like this get out there into the world and remember we're all heading to the same destination and there is no prize for getting there early so we might as well slow down

41:51Thank you.