The late Ursula K Le Guin wrote many well-loved novels, but few people know that the legendary science fiction and fantasy author once made an album. The strange and enchanting record Music and Poetry of the Kesh – which Le Guin created with the electronic musician and composer Todd Barton to accompany her 1985 book Always Coming Home – has been reissued, following Le Guin’s death in January.
Always Coming Home was one of Le Guin’s most fascinating and underrated works: a sprawling exploration of a fictional people known as the Kesh, who lived in northern California hundreds of years in the future. The book was a novel, a scrapbook and an imaginary anthropological study in one; it was crammed with maps, stories, songs, recipes, poetry, charts and language guides. A bounty of hand-drawn, rustic illustrations by Margaret Chodos-Irvine filled out the volume, with early editions sold packaged with a cassette tape of the album.
The album wasn’t an add-on to Always Coming Home, but an essential sonic companion to the book. Le Guin clearly thought music was important to the Kesh people, filling the book with references to music and even inventing several musical instruments from scratch – some of which Barton has built and played on the album, including a seven-foot horn called a houmbúta and a Weosai Medoud Teyahi bone flute.
Through Barton’s expert composition, the book snaps vividly into focus. Le Guin and Barton, with several guest musicians, created a compelling world through sound that made the stories in Always Coming Home come even more alive. Combining field recordings made by Barton in Napa Valley, California, with mellifluous poems and lyrics written by Le Guin in the Kesh language she invented, the sound is simultaneously otherworldly and believable. On the page, Le Guin’s Kesh poetry comes across as a series of cryptic incantations; a sample verse, from Arashaya Arrakou, or A Teaching Poem, reads: “Stechab hwana / ambad hwana / dambad hwamab / wegena ówoi / gedaó yenah”. (“To offer is river / to give is river / to accept the given / is the river’s running / the motion of water.”) On the album, the Kesh words are transformed by Le Guin’s voice: her careful enunciation and American accent solidly ground the mystical elements.
Music and Poetry of the Kesh is unique in its scope, but it also feels of a piece with other offbeat music of the 1980s, from the Fourth World ambient explorations of musicians such as Jon Hassell to the gothic fusion of Dead Can Dance and the ethereal wordplay of Elizabeth Fraser and the Cocteau Twins. As an album, it’s deeply weird and enjoyable; as a soundtrack, it’s a warm invitation to revisit the riches of Always Coming Home, a book that seems as magical and potent now as it did three decades ago.
