Bristol-based experimental folk artist Âellin shares 'Monarch' ahead of debut album release via Severn Songs
Âellin is the project led by Bristol-based writer, producer and multi-instrumentalist Siân Magill. A burgeoning force in the UK experimental folk scene, Magill’s songcraft is marked by a spirit of restless exploration and curious wonder. On September 5th, Âellin is set to release their debut album Constellations via Severn Songs (Ishmael Ensemble) - a richly imaginative and genre-traversing work that fuses folk-rooted instrumentation with electronic textures, philosophical inquiry and narrative ambition.
“I used to write fairly straight acoustic folk singer-songwriter tunes,” says Magill. “The songs were vessels to carry thought or lyricism; but I had always felt like the music and the sound could be pulling its weight more to convey the concepts or emotions.” After relocating from her hometown of Milton Keynes and immersing herself in Bristol’s experimental scene, she began to reimagine her creative process. “In the process of learning to produce, of sound-finding, I set to work to move concept-first in my songwriting.”
Constellations is built around a fictional protagonist named Seren (Welsh for "star"), who journeys through dreamscapes and philosophical thresholds in search of self-realisation and a sense of belonging. Each track serves as a vignette along that path - grappling with questions of identity, memory, healing, and myth. “Self-realisation is a beautiful and pivotal thing,” says Magill. “But it’s what you do with that in the larger context of community that counts. This notion of being one star in an infinitude of constellations – that’s what this album is about.”
Described by Magill as a “completely hand-sewn album,” Constellations came together across a series of makeshift studios. Initial sessions took place at a converted railway house in Norwich with Slow Worm Records, where Magill recorded the core folk instrumentation alongside Christopher Langton (Snazzback) on drums, Henry Edmonds on double bass, and Rebecca Shelley Woodman on violin. She then took her home studio on the road, working out of a town square apartment in rural France, a freezing cottage on a southern hilltop, and finally various homes across Bristol and Shropshire. Found sounds gathered along the way - from broken mandolins and church bells to “scissors from the garden shed” - feed into the record’s tactile, dreamlike atmosphere.
Magill’s love of literature and folk tradition is felt throughout, but Constellations also seeks to challenge both. “I became really inspired by the lack of female protagonists in fantasy… I want to write more female protagonists into things. Seren became one of those.” The album’s journey traces Seren’s transformation from isolated seeker to part of a greater whole, using philosophical and mythic imagery to reflect on identity, memory, and the unconscious.
New single ‘Monarch’ draws on the image of the butterfly to reflect on metamorphosis and transitional states. “It’s about the fragility and ungainliness of transitionary states,” says Magill. “When we are in states of transformation, do we symbolise ourselves in the same way that negates the individual journey?”
The accompanying video is a collaboration between Stroud-based videographer Narna Hue and Magill. It offers a visual response to the core concepts of 'Monarch' - exploring a fragmented vision of the symbolic self through moments of transition and metamorphosis.
With literary nods to Virginia Woolf, Carl Jung, Jorge Luis Borges and Jeanette Winterson, Constellations is as intellectually rich as it is emotionally resonant. But ultimately, Magill’s debut invites us inward - and outward - to recognise ourselves as one part of a much wider pattern.
