Hexvessel - All Tree CD

All Tree was the fourth album by Hexvessel. It was also the first step into a transmedia album release, where the narrative of the songs carried over into the images and videos surrounding the release. This page explores the release of All Tree and the way in which we realised the story of the album, and ultimately the band, over multiple platforms.

All Tree was an international collaboration project, by musicians living in Finland, recorded at Orgone Studios in Woburn, England with Jaime Gomez Arellano. The album featured British session musicians Daniel Pioro on Violin and Dirk Campbell on Flutes/Duduk. The record labels that released the album was Century Media/Sony based in Dortmund, Germany for Europe and Prophecy Records in North America/Rest of World. The album was co-produced between Jaime Gomez Arellano and Mat McNerney.

The concept behind All Tree was to unify the band’s world-view and spiritual belief into a defining principle, which could be easily explained throughout. As Hexvessel plays folk with nature mysticism themes, we wanted to convey what folk means and also what nature mysticism is. We used the “poet singers hands” illustration used prominently in the Kalevala, and ancient Finnish text, and throughout history, to symbolise the community, storytelling and transference of knowledge inherent in folk music. We then used the tree image, as with the title All Tree to symbolise the “world tree”, a prevalent archetype in many of the world's mythologies, religious and philosophical traditions, to represent the sacred in nature, relatable to Celtic and Pagan belief. The main message of All Tree is a sense of community that is created when you observe a spiritual connection to nature. For us it felt natural then to extend all the different aspects of the album across multiple platforms and to engage and connect with our community not just once the album is finished, delivered and released, but also during production and part of the production itself.