An Arrow Made of Air: An Arrow Made of Air (digital outlets)

We wish luck to those trying to keep up with the output of Auckland-based musician and facilitator Paul McLaney.

Aside from albums under his own name, those with his band Gramsci (their first three albums just released on enticing vinyl), his online project as The Impending Adorations and whatever else, now comes An Arrow Made of Air, a duet with Wellington's Oscar West (himself also half of the duo Polytropos with Rennie Pearson which explores traditional Celtic music).

With West on traditional instruments, McLaney here explores a kind of modern/traditional music inspired by the award-winning fiction-cum-history of invented British myths by the scholar Amy Jeffs in her book Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain.

It is a fascinating book in which Jeffs – “partaking happily in a venerable tradition of making things up” – creates a strange weave of original myths from the Bible, European antiquity, ancient Celtic stories and old manuscripts.

So when William Blake asked if those feet in ancient times walked in green England the answer is . . . Well, not Jesus particularly but anything is possible in Jeffs' reimagining, if you let the fancy and fantasy roll through what you know and don't.

So An Arrow Made of Air engage with the ancient and mythic on this album which has evocative passages on flutes, fiddle, drum and traditional instruments peppered throughout, conjuring up a mysterious Albion where the spirits of kings and queens, saints and soldiers appear like spectral apparitions.

In the songs McLaney's lyrics are oblique, leaning towards suggestions of place (“no curl of hair twisting and turning in the currents, gulls circling overhead” on Severn's Song), narrative (“beneath the belly of rain clouds, an army of the fallen” on A Slow Burning Flame) and visions: “The King in his tower with an army surrounding, the flames of the fire burning bright. The last thing he saw at the edge of the tree-lines, a young boy surrounded by light” on Child of the Sea.

Here is a world where mountains crumble, tears become rivers, the lyrics refer to established imagery (“her true love's hair was black as the crow” on The Wind Over the Water) and new landscapes are created from familiar clay.

You needn't have read Amy Jeffs remarkable book – book of the year for the BBC History Magazine and Daily Express awards, among other accolades – as long as you remain open to the possibilities that the past of Britain can be rewoven from available if obscure sources, and then have something like Wordsworth's "colouring of the imagination" thrown over it.

Someone famous once said that the truest response to a work of art is to create another.

In their own quiet way An Arrow Made of Air have responded to Jeffs' inventions with their own.

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You can hear this album (and pre-order the vinyl which ships out on the solstice) at bandcamp here

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Elsewhere has a considerable amount about Paul McLaney's various projects, including reviews, interviews and his own commentaries starting here