Output details

Invisible from Land and Sea

This is an example of a 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 (this output) in 2008 and followed this up with Skimmerin’ (see MacDonald 3).

The impact of this work is indicated in a range of broadcasts and re-releases. Tracks from this release have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction (16 Dec 2008; 18 Jan 2009; 17 Jan 2013); and on various Russian radio stations (e.g. Radio Kolomna, 5 March 2010). Track 6 from Invisible is included on a CD from the German independent label NoEthno, as part of its aural encyclopaedia of ‘World Music Instruments’. (http://www.noethno.de/index.html)