Arun Sood / Searching Erskine

Ordnance Survey One-inch Scotland, 2nd Edition (Hills), Published 1903. Sheet 89 – Sollas (Hills) Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Blackford Hill presents Searching Erskine – a 12-track album and book by Arun Sood.

Searching Erskine Arun Sood

Comprising conversations, field recordings, poetry, text, music, sound collage, photography and visual artworks, Searching Erskine is a response to the uninhabited tidal island of Vallay.

Vallay lies just off the island of North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland.

Arun’s words are accompanied in this book by visual artwork from artists Emile Kees, Rosalind Blake and Meg Rodger. The artwork has been chosen and positioned within the book in an attempt to present a kind of zooming up and out from Vallay. We begin on Vallay with Arun’s personal connection to the island, then Emile’s collaged archival photos join Arun’s words.

We then fly up to see Rosalind’s geological printmaking before finishing high above the island with Meg’s cosmological drawings.

Vallay, A Profane Illumination Arun Sood “…when the over and done with comes alive, when the blind field comes into view, when your own and another's shadow shines brightly.”1 – Avery Gordon There is a family tree, printed on A3 paper, which traces my relations on the island of Vallay back to the 1750s. Peppered amidst the hierarchal lines, which separate one generation from the next, is the odd photograph from the early twentieth century. It’s often been remarked how much the photograph of John MacDonald (my great-great grandfather, b.1855) bears an uncanny resemblance to me. But while his burrowed dark brow and angular bone structure is easily remarked upon, the extent to which he inhabits my breath, sound, being, and way of seeing is met with a silence of which I have always been curious and intrigued by.

Family trees and photographs can be good for tracing facts, but they are also linear, hierarchal and silent. Names and dates are empirical but impersonal. Lines appear fixed, static, quiet. Some family members appear closer than others. And it’s unclear why we call some our family, others our ancestors, and none our ghosts. Searching Erskine is an album and art project which seeks to sing over these silences. Using sound, composition, field recordings, oral histories, spoken word, visual art, archive, and photography; it’s an attempt to form a chorus with ancestors, and to sing about the place they once were, and remain.

Vallay lies approximately two miles off the northwest coast of North Uist, the Outer Hebrides. On foot, it can only be accessed from North Uist for two hours at low tide, across vast tidal sands which quickly flood with saltwater that gushes in from the Atlantic, cutting it off from the “mainland”. A central figure in the island’s history is Erskine Beveridge (1851–1920) – a textile manufacturer turned antiquarian, photographer and archaeologist. Beveridge’s textile business funded his travels throughout Scotland, and his “wanderings with a camera”2 led to the publication of several books on Scottish history and archaeology. Most notable were his archaeological excavations in the Outer Hebrides which he conducted from a lavish Edwardian mansion – Taigh Mòr – he built on Vallay in 1905. From his base at the “Big House”, Beveridge excavated “Earth Houses”, took photographs, polished bone fragments, and pieced together layers of the island’s peoples and pasts. This searching, or re-searching, led to the publication of North Uist: Its Archaeology and Topography in 1911.

Beveridge’s mansion was extravagant in its Edwardian heyday. Colourful fireplaces graced every room, fresh water was piped in from the

mainland, and it was said that exactly 365 panes of glass were used to populate the ornate window frames. As Fraser Macdonald notes in his essay “The Ruins of Erskine Beveridge”: This ample provision should be understood in the context of its [Vallay’s] remoteness: every brick and beam needed to be brought in by steamer and, depending on tides, offloaded on the shore for its final journey by horse and cart to the house site. Even the soil for the garden was imported by boat. These materials, once so carefully selected, transported and arranged, are now subject to the same ecological decay that buried Beveridge’s cherished Earth Houses. Taigh Mòr is a ruin. Its ruination continues with every passing year, bringing down a few more bricks, rafters, floor boards and roof-tiles.3 My grandmother, Katie MacNaughton (née Maclellan), was a housekeeper in Beveridge’s mansion. Her family lived in a small farmhouse adjacent to the “Big House”. She lit its numerous fires in the morning; polished the windows; and did the baking for Beveridge’s son George (who amenably employed her as a housekeeper while her brothers were paid to work the land). I grew up on her stories about Vallay. She spoke of wading knee-deep across the water, skirt hiked up, after a cèilidh finished on North Uist at dusk; her brother’s bagpipes droning across a moonlit strand; laments of leaving a special place knowing she would probably never return. The grand mansion gradually fell into disrepair after George Beveridge drowned in 1944 while crossing the strand at high tide; leaving no heir nor work for the small population of crofters, groundsmen, and housekeepers who departed

the island shortly after. My grandmother was one of the last to leave, and Searching Erskine locates my family story in this broader palimpsest of cultural, natural, and psychic layers that comprise the now uninhabited island.

There is of course an irony, or uncanny significance, to the fact that Erskine Beveridge was also concerned with recovering the past through photography, excavation, collecting… a continual searching for connections between the then and now. A continual connection between art, ancestry, and place. ~ Since 2011, I’ve responded to Vallay through poetry, essays, and taken many photographs. But these, like my family tree, were too silent, static, quiet. The sounds of the island needed to be heard, as did the people who knew it, who know it, and who are moved by it. This album incorporates spoken word from island descendants, including my own kin and those of Erskine Beveridge; as well as the throaty scowls of geese, flapping pigeons, and gull shrieks from within the decaying mansion itself. These sounds are set against newly composed musical responses to the island and its histories. The channeling of voices, original music, poetry, spectral yawps, and field recordings allow for ancestors to dance together, and to transcend spatio-temporal limitations through shared sonic experience. At least that’s what I like to tell myself, and them.

Camping alone on Vallay in 2019, I had a heightened sensitivity to the sounds of the place.

The geese, the gull shrieks, the grassy whispers.

I began to wonder if my grandmother might

have heard similar sonic tapestries to the ones I was hearing, only in a different time. It was these seemingly inconsequential sounds, heard within a dense weave of personal narrative and history, that began to prompt the possibility of sound triggering memories and re-imaginings of the past.

In discussing the role of sound in the writings of Walter Benjamin, the German literary scholar Helmut Kaffenberger describes the concept of an “acoustics of profane illumination”4, whereby seemingly accidental or inconsequential sounds can prompt transcendental memory recall. Kaffenberger describes how mundane sounds – buzzing, chirping, droning, rumbling – can inaugurate dream-like experiences and collapse temporalities, bringing the past into dialogue with the present in transformative ways.

These sonic “profane illuminations”, or “rememories”, bring us into contact with the past – even if there is no tangible sense of having physically been there. Mirko M. Hall has further described the mnemonic function of sound in its capacity to recover “longforgotten traces of past experiences”5. Thus, the sounds of a specific site or place become an excavation site, whereby acoustic ruins can be retrieved and reassembled to provide a “mode of knowledge that often exceeds logical categories of perception”.6 Like Beveridge’s excavations, my own recordings attempt to forge connections with Vallay’s past. The tracks blast acoustic phenomena out of their geographical and historical contexts; alter them; distort them; loop them; and reconfigure them into new constellations that explode the reified past.

The process of liberating the rumble of wind, roar of ocean, and birdsong from Vallay and rearranging them into new compositions allows for a recontextualization that transforms the past. That is, the sounds of place become a courier for past histories and peoples to be revealed, remembered, and redeemed…

It was this realization of the potentiality of sound which led to the recordings on this album.

Further Reading & Notes Benjamin, W. (1972–89) Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols.

Beveridge, E. (1911) North Uist: its archaeology and topography with notes about the early history of the Outer Hebrides, privately printed Edinburgh.

Beveridge, E. (1922) Wanderings with a camera privately printed Edinburgh.

Hall M.M. (2014) Walter Benjamin and the Dialectical Sonority. In: Musical Revolutions in German Culture. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137449955_3 MacDonald, F. (2013). The Ruins of Erskine Beveridge.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12042

₁ ₂ ₃ ₄

₅ ₆

Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, MN), 197.

Erskine Beveridge, Wanderings with a camera (Edinburgh, 1922).

Fraser Macdonald, ‘The Ruins of Erskine Beveridge’.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12042: 478.

Helmut Kaffenberger, ‘Aspekte von Bildlichkeit in den Denkbildern Walter Benjamins’ in Global Benjamin: Internationaler Walter-Benjamin-Kongreß, ed. Klaus Garber and Ludger Rehm, 3 vols. (Munich, 1999), 460.

Mirko M Hall, ‘Dialectical Sonority: Walter Benjamin’s Acoustics of Profane Illumination’. Telos: Crticial Theory of the Contemporary 152 (2010): 86. ibid.

Thought I Heard Someone Arun Sood and Emile Kees

This collection of photographs is a series of moments that took place on Vallay in the early 1900s. As a visual reaction to the music and poetry of Searching Erskine, these images have been worked upon and altered by hand.

Archival photographs were digitally reprinted, with new textures and colours introduced.

The abstraction and colouring of the landscapes addresses the concept of an image, or memory, changing over time – and the concealment of faces, space and objects reflects the fragmented and spectral nature of the album, as well as Vallay's history.

I thought I heard someone whistling was it you? or the birds? or wind against water?

The throaty scowl of geese a piercing gull shriek we are not alone here and neither were they and the water waltzes away slips into the Atlantic us, no longer an island

Katie

I thought I heard someone whistling and so we burn the rafters of Beveridge’s house to keep the cottage fire alight, to keep the fireplaces burning bright All those who left, remain, and are yet to leave I thought I heard someone whistling will you be having a dram with me now then, Mo ghràidh?

I thought I heard someone whistling

A stranger upon landing in a vast expanse of salt-water lochs

The Old Dictaphone

torturous recesses bogging seawards rugged declivities absolutely treeless Here are only three cottages, two of them occupied by shepherds and the other a tailor

Oh

He Was Drowned

it was a great place you wouldn’t think it was an island

They were walking to church on the Sunday and met by someone

The Cairn

they were searching for Beveridge there was no sign of him the baking hadn’t been gone near and his boat was found right enough There is a cairn

climatic changes total absence of trees without any re-afforestation reason to believe geological processes of significant devastation “In 1542 the valued rental of North Uist was officially reduced by two or three ‘merk-lands’”

Taigh Mòr

centuries later hazards breaking encroachment by sea a recent new extreme that they cannot answer to the worst sett in former times “And moreover we attest about candlemass last the sea overflowed severall parts of the countrie breaking down many houses to the hazard of some lives” it may happen, more and more

In the ashes of a fire once lit she stood next to rib-bones and an iron girder then whispered over Lachlan’s drones as the tide lapped in we lamented land lost for tonight we were an island

Land Seeps

where lands seeps to sea ancestors weep to be and ancestors be ghosts These your echoes our place your past These your echoes our place your past These your echoes our place your past (My mother used to do a baking for Mr Beveridge every Saturday)

is also norse a shallow water especially places where fiords or straits can be passed on horseback from Vasa, “to wade”

Vasa

The first recorded occupant was Godfrey MacGorrie and we find next Lachlan MacLean as “of Vallay” in 1718, 1721, and 1723 within a layer of peat continually shifting sands great changes in both climate and the relative lands of the sea a long past epoch of still more equable climatic conditions

Above, An Abandoned Piano Plays On I

All born home this morning an opalescent egg sits brightly propped on a roofless gable —The Lastborn.

How long did you live there?

I was the last person born on Vallay Was Colin not born there? Our Colin?

The Lastborn

Peggy might have been as well.

This is the questions that I get constantly I may be the youngest but I know nothing she died she was she left

I could hear

Above, An Abandoned Piano Plays On II

the grass growing was it you who passed away first hello

Crossing the Strand she spoke of emigration and hummed a song Cailin Mo Rùin-sa

Lachlan’s Drones, Dusk

the last song from the lastborn that I didn’t know I knew she spoke of emigration and hummed a song up the grand track curtsy on the portico polishing 365 windows but the baking hadn’t been touched these farewell laments skirt hiked to knees everyday they say goodbye everyday the drones rise everyday the drones rise

Crossing

Tha m'inntinn làn sòlais bhi tilleadh gun dàil, Gu cailin mo rùin-sa is leannan mo gràidh.

Katie

The Old Dictaphone

He Was Drowned

Collage: Emile Kees

Collage: Emile Kees

Collage: Emile Kees

Original Photo: Katie MacLellan and Mary MacLellan on Vallay, year unknown, Arun Sood private collection

Original Photo: Vallay, 1905, James Beveridge private collection

Original Photo: Vallay Boat, 1918, subjects unknown, permission from Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a' Tuath

The Cairn

Taigh Mòr

Land Seeps

Collage: Emile Kees

Collage: Emile Kees

Collage: Emile Kees

Original Photo: subject unknown, Vallay, c.1908, James Beveridge private collection

Original Photo: Vallay House / Taigh Mor, 1905, permission from Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a' Tuath

Original Photo: Varlish Point, c.1908, James Beveridge private collection

Vasa

Above, An Abandoned Piano Plays On I

The Lastborn

Collage: Emile Kees

Collage: Emile Kees

Collage: Emile Kees

Original Photo: subjects unknown, Vallay Strand, 1908, James Beveridge private collection

Original Photo: John MacDonald and Norman MacLellan on Vallay, c. 1920, permission from Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a' Tuath

Original Photo: John MacDonald and Peggy MacLean on Vallay, c. 1936, permission from Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a' Tuath

Above, An Abandoned Piano Plays On II

Lachlan’s Drones, Dusk

Crossing

Collage: Emile Kees

Collage: Emile Kees

Collage: Emile Kees

Original Photo: location unknown, 1908, James Beveridge private collection

Original Photo: Lachlan MacLellan on Vallay, c.1930, permission from Comann Eachdraidh Uibhist a' Tuath

Original Photo: Vallay House, c. 1975, permission from Historic Environment Scotland

Meshings, Vallay Rosalind Blake

Meshings, Vallay is a series of two-plate monoprints with digital additions. This work reflects on the experience of Vallay as a space of layered history: both human and non-human.

Formal elements draw on the architectural, aesthetic, and experiential qualities of the tidal island, while colour and movement communicate the ineffable sense of flow, flux and rhythmic fluidity. Gazing skyward through a shattered roof to a sky of infinite cerulean, memory, narrative, and sensation imbricate to form an experience of place.

This series explores how the sky, particularly at night, is a vast and constant system that links us with our ancestors. These Neolithic Skyscape drawings are “mythical”, playing on the idea of how our ancestors may have perceived a worldview from the night sky.

Neolithic Skyscapes Meg Rodger

They also explore the interface between archaeology and art. Archaeology is the science of interpreting cultures of the past and is restricted to facts. Art is the process of creating culture of the present and at the same time has the license to imagine how our ancestors might have interpreted the world. As human beings it is our imagination that continues to adapt, invent and create culture unique to our context and environment. It is this creative culture that makes us human and links us with our ancestors. Thus as artists we work ahead of the archaeologists laying down the culture of today to be discovered by archaeological trowels of the future.

“The cutting edge of the life process itself, the ever-moving front of a creative advance into novelty”.

Ingold, T. (2011) The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. (2nd Edition) London and New York: Routledge.

Searching

Erskine Arun Sood

Searching Erskine Album Notes

All tracks produced, recorded, and mixed at Cedarcroft Road, Devon – except Crossing recorded in Edinburgh.

Arun Sood

Mastered by Sam Annand.

Katie

The Old Dictaphone

I wrote these verses whilst camping alone on Vallay in 2019. The song is an imaginative commune with Gaga (Katie Maclellan – my grandmother), who lived on the island. Camping alone, I had a heightened sensitivity to the sounds of the place – geese, gull shrieks, grassy whispers – and began to wonder if she might have heard similar sonic tapestries to the ones I was hearing, only in a different time. That’s when I realized sound could be a way to connect with her; a way to commune with a place and past that felt simultaneously distant but also immediate. I layered field recordings from the camping trip over new arrangements I worked on with Alice Allen (Cello) and Alastair Smith (Synths). The process of layering found sound with new composition also provided a way of linking past and present, helping me to think about Vallay in way that was less static – as somewhere that could be re-imagined.

On my way to Vallay to do some more field recordings in 2019, I stopped at my cousin Myra’s croft on Harris. Myra’s father, Lachlan, had also lived on Vallay, so we spent the afternoon chatting between drams and biscuits and cheese. Lots of recollections, songs, myths and memories. Myra sang Gaelic songs, her husband Scott had a tune on the small pipes before playing tapes on a cassette player that doubled as a dictaphone. I recorded most of the afternoon, but when I came to listen back was haunted by the ghostly fragment of the song An t-Eilean mu Thuath (“Isle of the North”) I had inadvertently captured. I looped the fragment, and wrote the morose piano riff quickly after.

The spoken word at the end is taken from a passage of Erskine Beveridge’s book North Uist (1911), but my favourite part of the track is Scott’s background murmurs about his old dictaphone. The looping of ancestral songs and whispers throughout feels tidal to me – seeping in and out like an evolving memory which is always subject to change.

Katie

The Old Dictaphone

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

and Alastair Smith Arun Sood:

Piano, Vocals, Percussion, Field

Arun Sood:

Recordings, Tape Loops Alastair Smith:

Synths, Tape Loops, Sonifications

Alice Allen:

Cello, Vocals

William Kempe:

Piano

Piano, Keyboards, Vocals, Electric Guitars, Samples, Tape Loops, Field Recordings

Fergus Macdonald:

Acoustic Guitars

He Was Drowned

The Cairn

One of darker, almost gothic, episodes in Vallay’s history concerns the death of George Beveridge, who drowned whilst trying to cross the tidal strand back over to Vallay. His death partly led to the ruin and decay of his father Erskine’s mansion, Taigh Mòr; which in turn led to the departure of the island’s inhabitants, including my grandmother. This track is a response to the consequences of that episode, and features faint conversations with Peggy Maclean (also a former inhabitant) about Beveridge’s death, as well as who the last person born on Vallay was. There is an oral account (and possible family myth!) that my uncle Colin was the last person born on Vallay.

Colin died of a heart attack the year I was born, but it’s known that on the night of his death he woke to have a dram, before singing the Gaelic song Cailin Mo Ruinsa. I’ve come to think of it as the last song, by the last born, who I never knew, but know. Fragments of the song are sampled here, and it echoes throughout the album in different spectral iterations, culminating in Rachel Sermanni’s beautiful rendition at the end.

This is a requiem for George Beveridge, and the related consequences of his death. It features further conversation between Peggy, my mother, and family friends about the night George was found. Peggy’s recollections about her parents searching for Beveridge are succinct, haunting, fragmentary: “They were walking to church…walking the strand on a Sunday…they were met by somebody searching for Beveridge…there was no sign of him…they went back to the house right enough…the baking hadn’t been touched…he was drowned…his boat was found…there’s a cairn at the back of the island.” Her recollections straddle temporalities. They recount the past before turning to the present-day cairn which still stands on Vallay, breathing life into death and death into life.

He Was Drowned

The Cairn

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

and Alastair Smith

and Alastair Smith

Arun Sood:

Piano, Chanter, Tape Loops,

Arun Sood:

Field Recordings

Piano, Chanter, Tape Loops, Field Recordings

Alastair Smith:

Synths, Organs, Tape Loops

Alastair Smith:

Synths, Organs, Sonifications

Alice Allen:

Cello

Alice Allen:

Cello

Taigh Mòr (featuring Alice Allen)

Land Seeps

It’s hard to describe the sheer grandiosity of the ruin that now comprises Erskine Beveridge’s continually decaying mansion on Vallay. Fragments of different-coloured marble fireplaces crumble across the rooms; split rafters jut through porticos; and pigeons roost in the remains of lavish Edwardian bookshelves.

I wanted to dedicate a suitably grandiose response to this symbolic epicentre and image of ruin, past, and memory. It began with myself and Fergus Macdonald playing live together, pulsing distorted and delay-laden riffs against field recordings I’d made in different rooms of the ruined mansion. But it lacked intensity, grandiosity. Then up stepped Alice, who I briefed on a loose arrangement and concept, before she unleashed the Cello fury of Taigh Mòr. Fittingly, the track sounds to me like it could fall apart at any moment, whilst remaining imposing and foreboding.

Amidst accordion drones, this track features field recordings of me walking across the Vallay strand, as well as looped recordings of pigeons flapping around the ruins of my grandmother’s cottage, which lies adjacent to Taigh Mòr. While I found these sounds interesting enough to record at the time, it wasn’t until I read about Walter Benjamin’s idea of “acoustics of profane illumination” that they became more significant.

Benjamin’s idea is that seemingly banal or inconsequential sounds – buzzing, clinking, droning, or in this case the squelch of sand and flap of pigeons – can inaugurate dream-like experiences which impart previously unforeseen knowledge or traces of the past. It’s a manner of thinking about sound as a courier of memory and history that can continually be actualized, or revealed and reinterpreted in the present. I wrote the accompanying verses shortly after setting up my tent next to the ashes of an old fire, a few hundred yards from Taigh Mòr.

Taigh Mòr (Featuring Alice Allen)

Land Seeps

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

and Alice Allen Arun Sood:

Electric Guitars, Synths, Piano

Alice Allen:

Cello

Arun Sood:

Accordion, Keyboards, Vocals, Electric Guitars, Samples, Tape Loops,

Fergus Macdonald:

Electric Guitars

Field Recordings

Vasa

Above, An Abandoned Piano Plays On I

As part of the research for this project I came across some previously unpublished photographs of Vallay from the early twentieth century, in the possession of Erskine Beveridge’s great grand-nephew James Beveridge, now residing in New Zealand.

James kindly offered to record himself reading passages about Vallay from Erskine’s book North Uist. Collaborating across oceans and also across temporalities and time zones, there was an ancestral significance to this track for us both. The passages are striking in their detail about the etymology of Vallay (“from the old norse of Vasa – ‘to wade’”); as well as the island’s first inhabitants, geology, and climate.

Beveridge’s foreboding reflections on water levels and changing climatic conditions seem almost prophetic: “the existence of peat mosses at at Vallay testify to a long past epoch of still more genial and equable climatic conditions than now prevail”.

In the summer of 2011 my family – mother, uncle, and close friends – rented a cottage directly opposite the Vallay strand. It marked the beginning of a deep ancestral longing as I began to piece together how my own family histories formed part of a broader palimpsest of cultural, natural, and psychic layers on the island. These recordings feature faint conversations with my mother about who left for the mainland and why. Cutlery clinks in the background, feet shuffle, and a piano-tinkles while stringed instruments are being tuned in an upstairs room. With the help of my friend and collaborator Alastair Smith I later looped new compositions over the existing recordings.

This was a way of removing the cottage noise from its original context so as to become something new, transformative, and potentially illuminating. As Benjamin would have it, the idea is to manipulate sound in a manner that explodes the “reified past” through montage and re-imagination.

Vasa

Above, An Abandoned Piano Plays On I

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

and Alastair Smith

and Alastair Smith

Arun Sood:

Piano, Synths

Arun Sood:

Piano, Field Recordings, Tape Loops

Alastair Smith:

Synths, Organs, Sonifications

Alastair Smith:

Synths, Organs, Sonifications

William Kempe:

Piano

James Beveridge:

Vocals

The Lastborn

Above, An Abandoned Piano Plays On II

One of the first tracks I recorded for this project. I came up with the chord progression during the 2011 trip, but the recorded conversation is from Peggy’s cottage in 2017 (Sollas, North Uist). It features our reflections on an old photograph album as we attempted to piece together the past and its people. Peggy is the bearer of information throughout. At one point she reflects that she might have been the last person born on Vallay, before my mother reminds her of Colin. The uncertainty was, and is, more alluring to me than the knowing.

And it plays on…sound as a reserve of memory yet to be realized…

The Lastborn

Above, An Abandoned Piano Plays on II

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

Written and arranged by Arun Sood and Alastair Smith

Arun Sood:

Acoustic Guitars, Electric Guitars,

Arun Sood:

Piano, Field Recordings, Tape Loops

Synths, Keyboards, Samples,

Alastair Smith:

Synths, Organs, Sonifications

Tape Loops, Field Recordings

Lachlan’s Drones

Crossing (featuring Rachel Sermanni)

One of the most vivid and romantic memories my grandmother had of Vallay was her brother Lachlan playing the bagpipes at dusk.

Apparently his drones could be heard all the way across the tidal strand on “mainland” North Uist. On this track I decided to loop a chanter playing sections of Cailin Mo Rùin-sa (possibly the last song, from possibly the lastborn). The manipulation of the chanter, sampling of conversation, and spoken-word memories (of memories) culminate in a droning allegorical montage. Disparate stories from different sources are liberated from their original contexts and bound together in a reconstruction and re-imagining of the past.

A farewell lament that laps backwards and forwards, from the then to the now, featuring Rachel singing a beautiful, translated version of Cailin Mo Ruinsa. Rachel got involved off the back of a conversation we had about ancestry, song, and longing; and I remember a particularly poignant moment in which described how our children are ancestors too.

They bind our future with what came before us.

A recording of my daughter Vallya’s fetal heartbeat pulses faintly throughout the background of this track.

Lachlan’s Drones

Crossing (featuring Rachel Sermanni)

Written and arranged by Arun Sood

Cailin mo rùin-sa written by Donald Ross,

and Alastair Smith

arranged and translated by Arun Sood

Arun Sood:

Chanter, Field Recordings, Tape Loops

Rachel Sermanni:

Guitar, Vocals

Alastair Smith:

Synths, Organs, Tape Loops,

Laura Wilkie:

Violin

Sonifications

Arun Sood:

Field Recordings

Arun Sood

Emile Kees

Arun Sood is a Scottish-Indian writer, musician and academic working across multiple forms.

He was born in Aberdeen to a West-Highland mother and a Punjabi father, and has since lived in Glasgow, Amsterdam, Washington DC, and now South Devon. His critical and creative practice ranges from fiction, academic publications, sound installations, and poetry to ambient musical tapestries made up of field-recordings, guitars, piano, accordion, chanter, and programmed synths. Broadly, his varied outputs reflect themes of ancestry, diasporic identities, mixed-race heritage, migration, and memory.

Emile Kees (born 1995) is a self-taught photographer and collagist, producing work from a homemade darkroom built with reclaimed materials and equipment in the Southeast of the UK. Emile treats his works as scenes with no before or after, like islands broken off from the mainland of memory; snapshots of the human experience to be reconstructed and assembled after they have been photographed, developed and printed.

www.arunsood.com

www.instagram.com/emilekees/

Designed by Tommy Perman.

Printed by Swallowtail Print, Norwich.

Typeset in Scotch Micro and Sharp Sans No. 1

Rosalind Blake

Meg Rodger

Rosalind Blake is an artist and academic based in North Uist in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides.

Through her work she address human entanglements with nature and dismantles ideas of the human as the central figure within our ecosystem.

Rosalind aims to challenge the way we view and interact with nature, exploring the boundaries between wildness and control, and the human desire to connect with, but also to dominate, the nonhuman other.

Meg Rodger is a contemporary visual artist working on the island of Berneray in the Outer Hebrides. Her work explores the forces and cycles of nature in this extreme, inspiring and humbling environment, where nature is dictator, rhythm setter and provider.

Appreciating the knowledge, skills and culture of the people who dwell in these places is part of her process. However, her work is from the perspective that humans are not central but merely part of these naturally occurring systems and cycles that are complex, integrated and vast.

www.rosalindblake.com

www.megrodger.com

Published by Blackford Hill in 2022 in association with Random Spectacular.

BH008 | RS024 | ISBN: 978-0-9955242-9-3 www.blackford-hill.co.uk