CERVO is a place that holds its own unique serenity. I’m not well travelled (owing largely to financial barriers that I hope will someday be relieved) but I’m not sure that even when I am, I’ll be able to find a location so perfectly suited to creative exploration as this great cabin under the Matterhorn. I’m on possibly the most peaceful hill in London as I write now, sitting opposite from my sister whom I embarked on the CERVO residency with. We’ve become attached to a ladybird with a broken wing who has been sampling the crumbs from our lunch as he flits across our table. We call him “Little”. Over the hour, our emotions have flashed red from humour at his skittish trails and rejection of scone crumbs in preference for sourdough, to worry, as we lose him from time to time, only to find him resting between the sheets of a napkin and underneath the lifted lip of a plate to our great joy. I haven’t managed to focus on so whimsical a detail of nature since I was on “sheep watch” - the daily marvelling at sheep traversing the almost vertical mountainside from our room. We fancied ourselves Attenboroughs of the Alps as we called to the sheep, echoed their bells with our voices and documented their daily travelling distance on our instagram stories.
Our CERVO Residency was 11 days of whimsical detail. From the alternating daily health shots at breakfast that we canonised in our notes apps to the cowbell-soundtracked walks into town through which we walked off our overindulgences, to trailing skipping ropes through alpine tunnels, every moment felt dreamy, documentable and delectable. Days, like those at home, came with some struggle, reminders of heartbreak, toils of real life cracking through the valley of comfort that Zermatt offers, but when the light hit just so across the landscape, the troubles at the forefront of my mind melted into the vastness of the treescapes that climbed over and ahead beyond this small city girl’s comprehension.
At CERVO, I quickly snapped into a routine, but instead of being one proposed by a to-do list, it was shaped by the prioritisation of being well for probably the first time in my life. We arrived at CERVO with the intention and goal to spend our time there finishing our debut EP but construction noise outside of our room rendered our ability to record impossible. Our priorities as a result had to shift. We resorted to a quest of discovery and writing. Though my sister and I embarked for a joint project, we fell into our own daily routines, adjoining to work together at certain moments in the day whilst the rest of our time was used for unintentional but entirely necessary solitary development.
For me, contending with the grand human concept of time began to form the top of my agenda. CERVO is flanked by mountains that tower all around it, the Matterhorn the crowning compass atop a small town. I saw her in all her states, shrouded by cloud, glimmering in the sun, greyed from rainfall, ghostly under the blanket of the night, and her white cap peaking through dark, clear evenings. This was my third trip to this vast grounding place, but the first where I started to deeply sense time moving across the landscape as I travelled through my day. I eschewed the traditional hour, for periods I would lock away my phone and mark time through the number of intercrossing valleys forming in my increasingly prune like fingers as they caressed Onsen waters, designing minutes with my slowing breath as I settled into the sauna’s warm embrace, and finding safe moments to swim as the sun moved from a direct sun to skin spotlight to lighting an amber glow in the mountains that lay behind me. My CERVO routine responded only to my body’s calls, I answered the aches I could feel in the moment - pangs of hunger, need for lung opening, stretching new aches, grasping quick reality in sharp bursts of cold mountain morning sprints, vocalising perceived seconds through song, writing, sighs or loops instead of hearing the tick tock constancy of a daily schedule. I woke with the sun, took my sleepy eyes to gaze upon new Mountain views, stretched and soaked my hair in the cold mist of the morrow, nourished my hunger as the sun peaked over our side of the valley, swam the same direction of her travels, allowed my pen to glide across my notebook as the second hand would glide across a face - mood moving in a circle, heartbreak and joy doing rounds as I tried to decipher how they moved in sync as they each tore shreds of my creative reckoning and glued them to the pages of my notebook.
Days past as we neared closer to our “A Love Beyond” performance - the conclusion of our stay at CERVO. I had written more poetic passes and documented more thoughts than I had done in months. One afternoon, I’m not sure which, we convened in our room and sung hallelujahs in circles like the circling sun on the hill. We’d written two songs that day, in quick succession. Little proving, lot of harmonic improvisation, tears shed as I picked up the guitar and made sense of the granite green on blue that had been towering over my thoughts that morning. These songs fed the roundness of the time that had been spilling over and from me, but held the sharp edges of the senses i was trying to build from, or bury. I couldn’t quite figure out which. I felt good that our songwriting moment had bloomed and I took a deserved lie down break. My sister played through what we now think will be an album single in the balcony. I could hear her just so. Her delicate resonance floating through the window as church bells suddenly struck in the same key she had been singing. The first time I became aware of the time was in that moment - Zermatt’s watchful clock tower, peaking through the low town roofs, standing as tall as it could muster under the vertical pines struck 5, for the 5th hour of the afternoon. I leapt up, clicked record on my phone, encouraged my sister to keep playing. She sang in the key of the clock. It dawned on us both as the bells ended their tolling. Attempting to eschew time and find a peaceful, creative escape in Zermatt, we had written a song in perfect sync with it.
Living under the Matterhorn has this funny way of shifting your perspective - humbling your intentions and forcing you to surrender your plans and veer into your true purpose. CERVO provided the safety net that allowed me to sink into that reality fully. I thought in order to be creative I would need a space that allowed me to focus and create productivity, a plan, movement towards a goal. I am so grateful that CERVO threw that notion out of the window the minute I tried it. I thought I already lived my life in surrender to my craft, and to my goal of artistic freedom (as far as possible under the constraints of a rent based living system back home) but I hadn’t even scratched the surface of that before i embarked on this journey. I came away from CERVO thinking I might be forever longing. And to be honest, I still am. Longing for the comfort and safety that allowed me to make what I think has been some of my best and most free work. But I’m not longing in totality for this safety and comfort, for it has taught me that it’s not conditions I seek, it’s deliverance. It’s letting the work lead and building space for it even though those conditions might not be ideal. CERVO taught me that bringing the work to the environment means singing with it, not against it. And for that I will be forever grateful.
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