Output details

Skimmerin'

This is an example of digital release sharing new insights into the intersections of different musical traditions and sound worlds. Strange Rainbow is a collaboration between the researcher, an electroacoustic composer and sound artist, and Catriona MacKay, a Scottish clarsach player.

The researchers write: ‘This is a very deliberate meeting of traditions … As a duo [we] make music that seems at once dislocated and greatly concerned with roots and connections; a rendering of traditional musical language refracted through contemporary performance technique, and then again through the transformations of live electronics to explore new, unimagined colours’

MacDonald and MacKay gave their first performance as Strange Rainbow at the Glasgow Improvisors’ Orchestra festival in 2008 and have given multiple performances at the Sound festival in Aberdeenshire, at the Arches, Glasgow, and at Celtronica (part of the Celtic Connections Festival in Glasgow). The duo released Invisible from Land and Sea (MacDonald 2) in 2008 and followed this up with Skimmerin’ (this output), which was commissioned by Deveron Arts and made possible by a Deveron Arts residency in Huntly, Aberdeenshire in 2008/9.

Included in the portfolio that accompanies this output is the software Pot of Gold, also commissioned by Deveron Arts, which the researcher makes available for other musicians interested in taking forward the this work. Developed around workshops in schools in Aberdeenshire and designed to make the duo’s live electronic improvising tools widely available, it was presented to musicians and educators at a workshop in the Sound festival.

The impact of this work is indicated in a range of broadcasts. Tracks from this release have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction (21 April 2010); on Radio New Zealand (27 Dec 2011); and on various Russian radio stations (Radio Ultra 12 March 2010, Radio Neva-3 19 March 2010).