Mouth Music has featured a variety of musicians over the years, with songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Martin Swan as the only consistent member (and de facto leader).
Other musicians who have passed through the project include singers Talitha MacKenzie, Jackie Joyce (aka Helicopter Girl), Martin Furey, Jaq Ferry, Màiri MacInnes, Ishbel MacAskill and Michaela Rowan, plus fiddler Alison Crawford, Capercaillie/Shooglenifty drummer James Mackintosh, and pipe/flute/fiddle player Martyn Bennett.
The album included Mouth Music treatments of traditional waulking songs, old chanteys (sea shanties) marking coastal landmarks, John Cameron's 19th-century lament "Chi Mi Na Mórbheanna" and a version of the reel "Seinn O!"
[5] In reviews, Q Magazine labelled the album "surely the most innovative worldly sound of 1990…(it) represents a giant, mesmeric leap on from Clannad as "Harry's Game" was in its time," while the Guardian described it as "ethereal and utterly absorbing.
While criticising Swan's solo instrumentals as "pretty but unfortunately sound(ing) too much like New Age wallpaper", the reviewer concluded that “the sources are treated with muscle as well as respect… Mackenzie's sinewy voice and the deliciously knotty Gaelic lyrics are the album's strong suits… Mouth Music's combination of intelligence, beauty, and nerve has the power to unite both world-beatniks and mainstream rock fans in mutual exhilaration.”[6] Swan and MacKenzie parted company in June 1991, when MacKenzie's goal of bringing Gaelic music into the popular mainstream clashed with Swan's desire to abandon the focus on Gaelic and incorporate more aspects of modern esoteric instrumental music.
Following the somewhat acrimonious split, MacKenzie resumed her solo career, while Swan retained the Mouth Music name (as well as his ongoing technical partnership with arranger Chic Medley).
For this EP, Swan's instrumentation was augmented by contributions from Shooglenifty (and future Capercaillie) drummer James Mackintosh, and from Martyn Bennett (who returned to play flute and pipes).
[10] Mairi MacInnes' involvement had only ever been a temporary arrangement, and she subsequently returned to her solo career (she has continued to release traditional music albums as well as becoming a successful television presenter).
Following the departure of Mairi MacInnes, Swan began working with a new creative and vocal foil – singer-songwriter Jackie Joyce, a Dundee-born singer of Ghanaian descent.
It is really nothing to do with Gaelic in fact, except that it recognises a classic, simple rhythm and melody, has great energy and will go down a treat with the young, international club/ceilidh audience at which it is obviously aimed.
"[13] Despite the less enthusiastic critical response, Mo-Di was nearly as successful as its predecessor in the Billboard Top World Music Albums (rising to number two).
They were replaced by percussionist Jeremy Black, by Quee McArthur (Mouth Music's first full-time electric bass guitarist) and by a third singer, Willie Macdonald.
Triple Earth boss Iain Scott later commented "the cover was designed as a "fuck off, we're not a world music group" statement, but the main result in that area was to be impounded by Japanese customs.
[17] Joyce would eventually resurface in 2000 as Helicopter Girl, having embraced a soul/trip hop direction and ditched her precise folk-inflected vocals for a theatrical Eartha Kitt rasp.
The next Mouth Music record did not emerge for another four years, during which Swan relocated from Edinburgh and moved into a forester's cottage on an estate in the Scottish Borders in order to refresh his outlook.
In an interview with World Beat Planet, he recalled "I messed around with a lot of non-essential stuff in Edinburgh… When you are surrounded by seasonal change, you are more aware of the passing of time.
Seafaring Man featured a firm return to Gaelic traditional music and a more acoustic approach (although maintaining African rhythms and electronic dance grooves underneath the traditional instrumentation) It featured Swan on the majority of instruments, with only James Mackintosh and Michaela Rowan returning from the previous Mouth Music lineup.
In an interview with World Beat Planet, Swan paid particular tribute to his Seafaring Man vocal collaborators, saying "I think I've now found exactly the sort of voices I'd always been searching for but had despaired of finding.
"[1] In his review of the album in Songlines, Nigel Williamson called it "[Swan's] most confident take yet on the Gaelic tradition which continues to lie at the core of the sound.
There are subtle beats and grooves dropped into the mix, but swan has mostly chosen to rely on acoustic instruments (rather than samples or programmes) to create his increasingly stripped-down musical textures.
He has also employed a flurry of fine vocalists…[Swan] has reached a perfect synthesis in what he does, so that it's well-nigh impossible to tell which are contemporary compositions, and which carry the weight of tradition.
At this point the group was predominantly instrumental and consisted of Swan, Mackintosh (now with a greatly expanded percussion role), Alison Crawford (fiddle) and second percussionist Lamin Jassey.
Reviewing The Scrape for Mojo, Colin Urwin commented "Swan has now turned (Mouth Music) into a menacing barrage of sinister fiddle – with as many Scandinavian and Eastern European influences as Celtic – with the recent recruitment of Alison Crawford as double-pronged string attack… The result is a big barren sound that goes against most preconceptions of fiddle music, yet is so earthy and harsh that it's impossible to ignore or indeed resist.