SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Carmen Braden studies a specific sort of ecology.

Composer Carmen Braden's debut album, Ravens, is available as of today. - photo courtesy of Facebook

She's an acoustic ecologist, which is a study of the relationship between human beings and the environment, through sound. And it's through this discipline that she has created Ravens, her debut album.

On Ravens, released today, Braden is interwoven with sounds of the natural world with musical instruments and her own voice.

"There's a mixture of what I call adventurous art songs and chamber instrumental pieces that are all inspired by living in the North," she told Yellowknifer.

"There (are) field recordings of ice and a lot of my lyrics are about the North or have imagery of things like ice. One of the instrumental pieces is about ravens flying, so it tries to capture ravens flying in the wind."

But more than anything, Braden said, the unifying element of Ravens is her own voice.

"More than just trying to be a reflection of where I live, it's my voice from this space and how it's been influenced by it," she explained. "That's the obvious thing you'll hear: me."

Braden described the 11 songs on Ravens as crossing genres by bringing together both chamber music and songs she wrote.

The album's first song, Good Friends and Pretty Roads, is "a journeying song."

"It's quite simple and quite heart-felt, and there is guitar on it and simple drums," she said.

One of the instrumental pieces, Magnetic North, is of her playing only the violin and piano.

"It's about the magnetism of the North and what draws people up here," she said. "I took those ideas and abstracted them into this piece."

She described the song, Follow, as her "epic song."

"It's got a lot of voices on it and it builds for a long time, it's quite long, and it builds for about six minutes. It kind of becomes almost orchestral and really quite rich in sound."

There's even a banjo in Small Town Song.

"It's more like a funky little folk song," she said.

The album is available today on Centrediscs, an award-winning record label dedicated to showcasing Canadian composers.

While Ravens is Braden's first studio album, her music has been performed across Canada, including by the Elmer Iseler Singers, the Gryphon Trio, the Land's End Ensemble, GroundSwell and the Penderecki String Quartet.

Her compositions have also been performed at the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the National Arts Centre 2013 Northern Scene Festival, The Global Composition in Germany, the Shattering the Silence New Music Festival, the Land's End Emerging Composer Competition and the University of Calgary New Music Festival.