Sunday 23 October 2011
Doors: 8pm
Tickets:
£7.50 advance / £9 on the door
Earlier this year, three of Scotland's most intriguing young contemprary musicians - Aileen Campbell, Alasdair Roberts and Wounded Knee - enjoyed 12 weeks' unlimited access to the School of Scottish Studies' extraordinary ethnographic sound Archive.
The result is the first ever new music commission from Glasgow-based independent music promoters Tracer Trails - and in October 2011 we'll be touring the project around Scotland.
Join us to see Alasdair Roberts's eerie reworking of the mummers' play Galoshins, intertwined with the bizarre initiation rites of the Secret Society of Horsemen! Alasdair has been collaborating with puppeteer and drummer Shane Connolly to elaborate these curious ritual dialogues into a new drama and song cycle - a really exciting departure that we're thrilled to have facilitated.
Meanwhile, Aileen Campbell has created a new video work based on her research into mouth music, waulking song and the process of song learning, while experimental vocalist and raconteur Wounded Knee invites us to follow his own Archive Trail to the darker corners of the catalogue, through brass bands, folk clubs, and the language and lore of east coast fisheries.
AILEEN CAMPBELL
Aileen Campbell is a visual artist as well as an experienced chorister and member of the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra. Her practice centers on an investigation into the embodied properties of the human voice, through performative works and their documentation in video.
She’s interested in the mass “chorus” of voices represented within the Sound Archive, as well as the history of the collection and its physical presence in the building where it has been housed since 1951. As a photographer and film-maker, of course, she’ll also be spending a lot of time in the School’s vast Photographic Archive.
STARFORM - Alex (Aileen Campbell, 2007) from Tracer Trails on Vimeo.
Aileen Campbell on Axis Web
Aileen Campbell on the ICA website
ALASDAIR ROBERTS
Alasdair Roberts is possibly the only musician to have starred on the covers of bothWire and fRoots magazines, reflecting the uniquely innovative nature of his work which couples interpretations of traditional material with new compositions drawing on the folkloric stock of Scotland, Britain and the wider world.
Best known for his re-reinvention of the Scots ballad tradition, he’ll be taking the opportunity of this residency to pursue new avenues: he intends to spend his time in the Archive researching and reworking the mummers’ play Galoshins to create a new, extended drama and song cycle.
Alasdair Roberts - Ned Ludd’s Rant (for a World Rebarbarised) from Onder Invloed on Vimeo.
Alasdair Roberts website
Drew Wright - alias Wounded Knee – takes an interest in popular song, chants and ditties. Inspired as much by minimal techno as by folk forms he creates a strange and timeless Janus music that looks both to the ballads, shanties and worksong of old and the mechanised minimalism of the new: future primitive music.
Whereas Alasdair’s work focuses on texts – manipulating, recontextualising – Drew’s primary interest is in sound: texture, rhythm, melody, noise. He’ll be looking at canntaireachd and mouth music and the ‘sounds in the silences’ of the tapes (clocks ticking, cats mewing, sneezes!).
Ayrtime.org Wounded Knee Soundcheck from Chris Dooks on Vimeo.
Wounded Knee on Bandcamp
ARCHIVE TRAILS
Founded in 1951 to gather, document and preserve the oral traditions of Scotland, The School of Scottish Studies played a central role in the Folk Revival of the 1950s and 60s. Fieldworkers including Hamish Henderson and Alan Lomax conducted research there, and their field recordings are now held - on open reels, cassettes, discs, wax cylinders - as part of the School's massive Archive of songs, tales, oral history, ethnographic photography and video.
In partnership with the School (and in celebration of its 60th anniversary in 2011), Tracer Trails has commissioned three musicians/artists - Aileen Campbell, Alasdair Roberts, and Drew Wright (Wounded Knee) - to create new work drawing on material unearthed during a three-month residency in the Archive.
The residency ran from January into April this year, and three new works are currently in development, to be premiered and then toured in October. Ali has been collaborating with puppeteer and drummer Shane Connolly on a re-working of the mummers' play Galoshins, intertwined with the bizarre initiation rites of the Secret Society of Horsemen. Drew, an experimental vocalist and raconteur, will be presenting a semi-fictionalised account of his own path through the archive, through recordings of brass bands, folk clubs, and the language and lore of east coast fisheries. Aileen (a visual artist working with sound, and a member of Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra) will be presenting a video work and potentially also a performance looking at private singing and the process of song learning.
Archive Trails website
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