MAVIS is five voices, five friends, brought together by a shared commitment to the voice, to tradition, and by a desire to shape a sound that is truly our own. Our musical and personal backgrounds differ. Yet when we sing, those paths converge in a moment that is, by nature, fleeting: that instant when a voice becomes something beyond the individual, something that connects and can be shared. The title of this album, drawn from Emily Dickinsons fragile yet enduring metaphor. MAVIS grew out of curiosity about what happens when differences are not smoothed out but are allowed to exist side by side. Within the ensemble, diverse practices meet: early music, contemporary repertoire, close harmony, jazz influences, conducting and composition. Love Is a Thing with Feathers is built around the bird as a symbol of love, and also of movement, lightness and freedom, bringing together music that ranges from Renaissance polyphony to contemporary choral works, interwoven with arrangements that draw on close harmony, southern rhythms, and elements of popular song. Featuring Orlando Gibbons The Silver Swan, Thomas Moreleys Now Is the Month of Maying alongside more contemporary songs, Lennon & McCartneys Blackbird or Fraser Wilsons Scarborough Fair, this is an album exploring the relationship between love as expressed via the idiom of birds.