“Sailors and Insomniacs is an amazingly assured debut”
“māsa’s songs are delicately woven, like the silk threads of a tapestry, drawing from history and literature to create relatable songs that remind the listener they are not alone.”
“māsa offer the storytelling intensity of an expressionist painting through the peal of their voices”
Photo by Alfie Topham
māsa (formerly known as Currer Bell) channel the essence of folk narrative into contemporary songwriting elevated by an array of instruments, soundscapes, and their sister harmonies. From an early age, Faron and Merle were homeschooled, which gave them the space to create a shared imaginary world brimming with characters and scenes to fill their storytelling songs. The importance of this sibling bond is behind the name: māsa means sister in Latvian, the language of their great-grandmother, whose extraordinary life-story and vivid imagination remain a treasured legacy for the duo.
māsa have toured as a support act, played festivals such as HowTheLightGetsIn, and worked on a variety of multimedia projects. They retold folktales and invented new ones with Kerchief Theatre, and resurrected forgotten laments and rhymes for We Are All Sonambulists, an immersive guide to their Somerset hometown. The Tower, a song from their debut album, was used in the Apple TV series Dear Edward.
In 2021 they released their debut EP as Currer Bell, Lullabies for an Apocalypse, “a breath-stilling set of five songs, threaded with rare intelligence and poetic imagery”- From the Margins. Inspired by classic writing and myth, featuring renowned drummer Gary Husband, and exploring the theme of catastrophes ranging from the personal to the planetary, Lullabies for an Apocalypse spins timeless tales to address modern issues. Listen here.
In 2022, māsa successfully crowdfunded and released their first album, Sailors and Insomniacs, “an amazingly assured debut that draws you into their utterly distinctive imaginative world” - Telegraph.
“The sounds they make seem to just sit inside the sternum somewhere when you
listen to them”
Sailors and Insomniacs
This album is your invitation to voyage into the deep sea psyche with us, investigate your small hour fears, and discover what lurks beneath the waves.
In an attempt to avert our own madness, we created two archetypes: the Sailor and the Insomniac. The Insomniac, on the edge of insanity, has been sleepless for too long in a callous world, and is drawn to the seashore’s whispering waves. The Sailor is searching for something - he’s not sure what. All he knows is he has to keep braving the depths and reading the stars.
Each song we wrote became a short story about one of these archetypes in a different guise: a little boy building a boat, a mudlark, a becalmed sailor, an unravelling fishwife, a circus performer. Under the surface of each narrative is something universal: the worries that make us sleepless, the storms we have to sail through, the difficulty of navigating through a world with no guiding lights, that sense of being an outcast or freak.
These songs are for those of us who feel like shipwrecked sailors, sad clowns, dancing bears or rudderless boats.
Lullabies for an Apocalypse
by māsa
“a breath-stilling set of five songs, threaded with rare intelligence and poetic imagery” — From the Margins
Listen in full here.
Underside
The second single from māsa’s 2022 album, Sailors and Insomniacs, Underside inverts an old Brothers Grimm folktale, and tells a story of feminine power and the environment.
“māsa send us into a dreamy galaxy with their breathtaking effort, Underside” — A&R Factory
My Love Went to Sea
This is the first single from māsa’s debut album, Sailors and Insomniacs. Built around a harmonium drone, the track evokes traditional ballads of loves lost at sea, using the imagery of unfathomable depths as a metaphor for the struggle to connect with loved ones suffering from depression.
“It’s downright stirring, possessing a mythical grandeur” —Two Story Melody
Sisyphus
Put your shoulder to the boulder.
This song speaks from the future to warn of the consequences of environmental collapse. Updating the Greek myth of Sisyphus to frame humanity’s struggle with the outcome of climate crisis, it gives voice to the rage and fear of the young generations facing the consequences of a poisoned planet. Renowned drummer Gary Husband (Level 42, John McLaughlin, Quincy Jones) delivers an elemental drum performance.
Perfect Stranger
Have you ever experienced a certain sadness when walking in parks? The strangeness of being surrounded by so many passing figures, but feeling undeniably alone at the same time? Have you ever sat on a bench and wondered who sat there before you? Perfect Stranger, our second single, explores digital age disconnection and takes the form of a conversation between two strangers on a park bench.
Found Her Out There
This debut single is our adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s poem of the same name. Hardy wrote this whilst grieving for the death of his wife, revisiting the places they had explored together along the South-West coast. He found that the landscape kept the memory of her alive and conjured up a phantom of the woman he knew. It’s a beautiful poem about death and memory, but it also feels like an ode to the inner wild woman. We had this in mind whilst producing the track, and aimed for a fiercely ethereal soundscape of folk-pop influences and old Celtic roots.
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