It might be easier to travel through disjointed time by listening first. Mirry (2021,) opens on a joyous note, Anthem, as it pulls us into Mirabel’s orbit. It transports and uplifts, rippling with audible scratches and variations in tempo. The listener pictures gliding throughout the entire album as soft moments carry from one part of a familiar house to the next, then to a lake, landing on feelings and its people. This archival exploration goes beyond fact retrieval. It demonstrates a process of care in which future family members selected, interpreted and embedded the complexities that exist between remembering and one’s personal encounter with objects. Stirring still is the very obvious perfection of the collaboration, as if, all those years ago, Mirry had chosen Fraser and Tong to carry her torch. Above everything else, the futuristic combination worked because of Mirabel and Geoffrey and the palpable malleability of their combined essence.

“It survived a lot of space culls.” When Fraser speaks of discovering “a box of things” outside his grand-parents’ house in Nottinghill in 1985, he describes “this mountain, above my head, a pile of what would now be considered eBay gold. Everything was worth keeping. Most of it I sold ten years later when I found I had to be able to fit all my belongings into my old ambulance when I left Inverness and moved down to Edinburgh. The record survived that probably because it was small and I was still curious about it. It was really odd. Completely smooth on one side with this funny scratchy piano recording on the other. I didn’t like the music. I probably played it twice in those 10years. But it sat there, in my record box.” Fraser had been playing around with sound for his other musical projects Tantrum and Faketan and had imagined incorporating a few pieces of this puzzling record. With COVID hitting and altering the course of any musical plans, he finally spoke to his brother-in-law, Simon Tong, about Mirry’s music. Perhaps it was their collective excitement, or their aunt’s contagious spirit, that led the project to develop at a rapid pace.

To its listeners, the riddle enacted by the production of the album shows an understanding of the lost musician whilst speaking of the next stages of transtemporal travel. When films of Mirabel captured by Geoffrey were later uncovered, hiding in Fraser’s grandmother’s attic, it added a new enchanting level to Mirry. Fraser had very few memories of his great aunt. “I was young and shy and didn’t really like speaking to adults. To me, she was just another old person in a room of grownups and I just wanted out. So really the music and images and video are the only person I know and I am really only guessing at who she was.”  The video created for Consolation is arresting. We see Mirry staging time-keeping as she drives and packs. Gestures and movement may persuade the viewer of her ordinary life: decor and outfits point to regular and routine behaviours belonging a woman undergoing a very normal lived experience. Fraser and Tong’s masterful editing and musical add-ons highlight something above normalcy. Seeing Mirry in an environment of tradition and quotidian with music carrying us through comes to show us that what one leaves behind, particularly with decibels, sings the extraordinary.

Mirry was a carer throughout her life. She looked after her parents in Ireland from a very early age. Her father had strict rules for her mother, a trained concert pianist. Despite his disdain for music and his firm control, a young Mirabel was taught to play by her mother: an act of rebellion that would travel across decades. In her 50s, Mirry moved to the UK and got a job as a carer for another elderly couple in Wiltshire. When the lady passed away, the old man, then in his 80s, married Mirry as she continued to look after him. After his passing, she was moved out of this house by his children into a smaller one, where she spent the rest of her life. “It can’t have been the life she had hoped for at the start.”

Fraser didn’t originally think of his desire to rework Mirry’s music as carrying any particular weight. “It’s not like I thought anyone would hear it. My main thought during  those 6 months of recording was to not embarrass Simon by being hopeless at music. I was worried that my contributions would be laughably bad as it had been a long time since I had worked with anyone else. I didn’t know how to respond to other people’s ideas. So I was constantly reading Simon’s emails and replies and noting how kind and generous and encouraging he was whilst also guiding  and hinting. I was trying  to learn how to reply to his emails and allow myself to have opinions too without being rude or strident.  It was a lovely experience. Maybe because it was such gentle music we were working with. Perhaps Mirry’s gentleness removed what could have been a very fraught and fractured experience. Maybe because it was family I was able to move beyond the usual fragilities of ego and fear.” Through reading of Fraser’s experience, Mirry’s past as someone who fostered and guarded others increases in tangibility. The lightness with which she was remembered accompanied Fraser through this “lovely experience,” not only ensuring a more delicate process, also softening any personal thoughts he might have had about himself and his music. “I don’t think Mirry was cared for enough during  her life. But I am only guessing. I hope we did better than that.” As the album and films gradually took shape, a friend of Simon's, writer Kirsteen McNish, a long term carer herself, came on board to curate the work and help Fraser and Tong to bring Mirry's music and story into the public domain.

The radiant album wouldn’t have sang itself into existence had it not been for Mirabel’s partner in crime. “Geoffrey Drage passed away in the spring of this year so I feel I can be a bit more open about his life. While at university in the early 1950s he became very ill, moved home and never really left again. He was bed-bound for the last 10 years or so of his life. I never saw him outside of my grandparent’s house. Two of my sisters never saw him at all. The only person he ever left the house for was his Aunt Mirry but I think those visits had stopped by the late 60s. Sometimes, when I would visit my grandparents in the ‘70s and ‘80s I would see him briefly. He was quiet and gentle, often curious about the outside world I was experiencing. He would mainly ask about the new music I was listening to and the films I had watched. He never mentioned Mirry’s music or the films he had made. I can’t remember the order of things but he had produced a cassette of Mirry’s original music and we had spoken about how he had recorded his aunt. First with the mobile record cutting machine you could hire and then when he didn’t really like the result (it is an awful sounding record,) he bought a tape to tape recorder and learnt how to record, microphone placement and editing tape. He really tried to improve the quality of the recordings. I think Mirry just liked to play and was constantly tweaking  her pieces. We have different recordings of the same pieces: they vary in performance but also in what she is playing. There are some films he took of himself listening and editing tape and film. He probably should have been a film maker, he liked new technology. Which is why he also had a stereoscopic camera and took so many photographs.”