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I Cannot Sing You Here, But For Songs Of Where

This CD/digital album is the culmination of practice-led research, released internationally on Scottish independent label Armellodie Records on the 6th May 2013. The research explicitly addresses potential defining characteristics and the status of contemporary alt-folksong and its roles in the articulation of place through a collection of twelve original songs. The work approaches the term ‘place’ from the direction of subjectivity and the performance of identity as they relate to geographic experience. The album takes the perspective of a re-/dis-located, subject. Subsequently, a diasporic neurosis concerning home and authenticity leads to a focus on aspects of place related to past (Shetland), heritage (Ireland), present (Cornwall), and ‘in between’. Songs have been composed iteratively alongside written/read/listened research, and through field trips and recordings, carried out over roughly 50 locations. The album draws on theories of Popular Music and Postmodernism, but also looks to ethnomusicology of Folksong, and interviews with practitioners, characterising the relationship between traditional music and contemporary alt-folk. There is particular focus here on the use of autobiography, assessing the value of such a songwriting method, and aspects of musical ‘meaning’. Furthermore the album investigates, aesthetically and ideologically, the use of production/recording technologies as themselves significant sources of meaning. As such, different formats and fidelities are used throughout. The Album has been widely (and universally positively) reviewed, and was described by the Scottish Herald as ‘rewriting the rules of the genre and making beautifully melancholic music’. It also received four star reviews in the Irish Times and The Skinny, nine out of ten from Neon Filler, and eight point five from With Guitars. This album contributes to the growing body of popular music research and practice and usefully situates itself culturally in the interesting ground between contemporary song and the chronology of traditional music.