Asked if she fancied making ‘extreme early music’, Stef Conner couldn’t resist. Little did she realise how extreme. She explains how she has breathed life into a 4,000-year-old language

Sometimes the question “What kind of music do you play?” presents a challenge. Before I can answer, I need to know how much time you have. If I’m just making polite conversation, any of “world”, “jazz”, “classical” and/or “folk” will do (it’s all and none of those). Or, more shrewdly: “It’s a bit difficult to explain – you have to buy the album to understand.”

Lyre player Andy Lowings with the replica of the gold Sumerian lyre. Photograph: Mark Harmer

If an interlocutor looks settled in for the long haul, I might make a clumsy attempt at the truth and say I sing melodic contemporary settings of poetry in ancient Mesopotamian languages, accompanied by a replica 4,550-year-old gold Sumerian lyre. It’s not ancient Mesopotamian music – it can’t be, because nobody knows what that music sounded like. There are some cuneiform tablets that describe the ancient tunings and modes, and I incorporate that theory into my musical language, but I am not attempting to reconstruct ancient music. I sing contemporary pieces that draw inspiration from the ancient world.

I tried to type that into the genre field when I put the album on iTunes, but it didn’t work.

It all started in 2012 with an email from instrument-builder and harpist Andy Lowings. “Hi Stef!” he wrote. “Do you fancy making some extreme early music?” We were introduced by a fellow ancient-lyre enthusiast (it’s a small but select community) in the weirdest kind of musical blind date: “Eccentric singer of dead languages seeks ancient-instrument-builder to produce uncategorisable music.”

Andy set up the Gold Lyre of Ur project in 2004, to build a playable replica of one of Iraq’s national icons: the gold lyre discovered in the Royal Graves at Ur by Sir Leonard Woolley, in 1929. With contributions from an international community of scholars, craftspeople and enthusiasts, Andy remade the instrument using authentic techniques and materials, including cedar wood from Afghanistan, bitumen, Gulf pearl shells and lapis lazuli. Once the instrument was completed, artists from all over the world contributed work to the project, but the gold lyre of Ur had never been used to accompany singing, and Andy was looking for someone to sing in Babylonian (one of two variants of the Akkadian language, spoken in Mesopotamia, c2500BC–AD100).

Andy was looking for someone crazy enough to try singing in Babylonian

Actually, singing in Babylonian isn’t such a crazy idea – there’s a Teach Yourself book about it. Owning (though not reading) a copy of that book, and having skimmed a Wikipedia article on Akkadian Phonology, were my qualifications when I met Andy and producer Mark Harmer for a Mesopotamian jam session. With no real knowledge of the language and music of ancient Babylon, I improvised a piece by singing text from the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh while Andy played a lyre riff. It sounded amazing.

Thousands of hours of reading and listening later, when we started recording our album The Flood, I knew a thing or two (more than the man on the street, at least, unless that man happens to be an Assyriologist) about Mesopotamian music and poetry. But, surprisingly, that first, uninformed improvisation still sounds to my ears like the most authentic piece of music we’ve made. It’s the title track of the album, and our most frequently performed piece. Sometimes basic intuition can yield astonishing results.

Our strangely mismatched skill sets (me a classically trained musician, Andy a self-proclaimed amateur) coalesced successfully, if uncomfortably at times, to produce something outstanding.

We never expected to outsell One Direction... we were driven by obsession

Despite the impossibility of describing it succinctly, and the vicissitudes of transporting enormous gold lyres, our eccentric project has become a rather wonderful touring ensemble. We never expected to outsell One Direction when we decided to make a CD in ancient Babylonian. Instead, we were driven by obsession, knowing that, although our eccentricity might imprison us on the margins of the music industry, the poetry and instruments provided the inspiration to make truly exciting music, simultaneously very old and very new.