Reprised pairing of the piper and the mandolinist, on a melodic crusade, inviting their neo-trad to carry the ecological message.

Release Date: 29th March 2024

Label: Self-Released

Format: CD / digital

If you aren’t familiar with the name, you will be familiar with the participants, each of them riding high the current wave of Celtic neo-trad. For it is powerhouse piper, Ali Hutton, from Treacherous Orchestra, Old Blind Dogs, and the other half of Symbiosis, his duo with fellow piper and friend, Ross Ainslie, paired with Laura-Beth Salter, mandolin maven with the Kinnaris Quintet and The Shee. This isn’t their first collaboration, an earlier EP, Beginnings, having snuck out in 2019. With busy schedules and young families, it has taken that length of time to complete this project, navigating also what else the world had to offer. Which becomes, in effect, the point and purpose of the collaboration, it being to celebrate nature and its infinite power to heal. 

Neo-trad, then? Probably what I used to call gaelictronica, that potent moonshine that mixes the orthodoxy of Gaelic song and music with the electrickery of synths and sequencers. With Niteworks about to hang up their pipes, moogs and prophets, a number of contenders, like Valtos, are waiting in the wings. I would suggest From The Ground could well be another.

Opening with some moody synths, alongside captured waves from one of the pristine Isle of Harris beaches, small pipes then weaving a slow meandering air against that backdrop. Some percussion limbers up, highland pipes now adding their keen. More setting an atmosphere and an introduction than much else, but, heck, what an atmosphere, what an introduction. The title track follows, ushered in by more found sounds; the wind whistling on Skye, we are told, and it is a Salter composition, with crashing percussion behind her silky smooth vocal and tenor guitar. From the perspective of a grand old oak, it features twinkling keyboard synth tones and the backdrop of Patsy Reid’s viola adds further depth, before the song drops back to just voice and piano. Duncan Lyall adds bass, electric and moog, and a chorale of voices add momentum. It is all quite something and has the small hairs all arising. Hutton, should it not be taken as read, given his track record, supplies guitars, keyboards, programming and, of course, a bevy of pipes and whistles. Oh, and he designed and provided the album artwork, and, should you order it, will have likely packaged it up, popped on the stamp and posted it!

Boreal is a set of paired instrumentals, Paper Boats and Taiga, the first reprising that pleasing ripple of soundscape from the track before. But Hutton’s low whistle breaks the calm, with moog bass and Paul Jennings’ drums. stacking layers, and the theme builds with what may be choral vocals, maybe synth and are probably both. Salter’s mandolin then takes up the baton of the melody line, and it is quite the proggy/folk interface so often denied by practitioners of each. I am uncertain when or where it became Taiga, but will lose no regrets on that, so well put together is the whole. Taiga, lest you ask, is another name for the boreal, or snow, forests that cover, or did, so much of the great far northern landmasses, Russia, Greenland, Canada.

Mandolin and fiddle accompany a simple electric guitar scale to fashion the triad of Broken Shores into shape. First part, To Catch The Falling Rain is a gently insistent air, with an undercurrent of anticipation tugging seamlessly ahead it stripping down and back, with echoes and shimmers of sound around the still trilling mandolin. Languid guitar and fiddle take it into Lifeblood, which becomes another spiralling rhapsody of near unisons, a slow reel. Reid shows quite why her fiddle tone is quite in such demand, she and Salter ascloseasthis in their playing. Just before reverie drags you away with the faeries, there comes the spoken word interpolation of Jim Mackintosh, and his poem, Broken Shores, the sound of which, the shoreline being broken by waves, it also ends.

Wake Lines has another of those crescendo builds of instrumentation to beckon it in. Salter takes up the vocal. Her voice is strong and pure, making it all the remarkable that her main gig is within an instrumental group. A choir of voices hover around her voice, possibly including that of Mànran’s Kim Carnie, possibly multi-tracked Salters. A simpler, if neither simple, construction, the rich sound of Reid’s viola is the ideal accompaniment, the reassuring rhythmic clatter of Lyall and Jennings propping it all together. Already I am desperate to see how and with who this will translate live. The much shorter and more pensive Aquila follows, a juddery instrumental that merges the organic of whistle and mandolin with electronic bass and percussion. A sucker for this, consider me sucked, or sucking, whichever it is. My only issue is that, at under four minutes, it is too short, some near chanted vocal bringing it down to earth.

Braver One is more electro-acoustic jiggery-pokery, a song that feels like a traditional ballad, driving forward with a folk-rock lope. The viola plays at counterpoint, sounding almost like a trumpet, which is appealing, as the backgrounds shudders in and out an electronic maelstrom. Those extra tones bring in the textures that cut it from a finer cloth than folk-rock might normally assume. The Beautiful Cold has an almost brittle and glassy sharpness to the jagged mandolin notes, over which Reid fiddles a beguiling melody, she certainly earning her parts in this project. Salter then takes the lead with a mandolin part, electric guitar making sonorous shapes in the foreground. Overall there is a misty woodland eeriness about this one, with Lyall introducing a bottom layer on moog bass. Just as it seems to approach a climax, whistles cascading about the thematic pulse, it begins to fade, like a will o’ the wisp. (And, you should note, it is a different version and arrangement of the same named track that appeared on the original EP.)

Final track, Breathe, another two-parter starts with spoken word, “I often escape to nature….she overwhelms me“, and, this time, it definitely is Kim Carnie. Solo mandolin fires up, and plays ahead a further statement from Carnie, that being the trigger for perhaps the most traditional sounding tune, or, at least, arrangement, across this disc. As more of Lyall’s moog bass insinuates itself in, there is more speech, this time from US celtic musician, Danny Schwarze, which bridges the song from Room To Breathe to Life Afloat. This is a more skittery piece, and contains some of the best interplay ensemble playing here. At last the bagpipes sneak back in to the mix, my personal tastes always wanting more bagpipes, a skirl allowing a final round or spoken word, this time from all the participants thus far, closing down with Nick Ray, advocate for mental health and kayaking, with a triumphant flourish of “for a while I can just be“, that, by process of elimination, I think must be writer/stage director Jeremy Raison. Not always a fan of speech in song and music, here, I have to say, it fits and works, adding a gravitas to the ecological message of intent that Hutton and salter would have us heed. Yet, despite that message, this remains, too, an entirely palatable concoction of musical notes alone, neither swamping the other. Some credit should go, thus to the recording and production team of Barry Reid, himself no stranger to this style of music, and brother of Patsy, mixing by Duncan Lyall and the man of many parts himself, Ali Hutton, in charge the final production.

If you want to know a bit more about how this recording came together, fly over to BBC i-player and catch Scotland Outdoors, from 20/3/24, available for around a year. This features an interview, and a walk around Glasgow Green, with Hutton and Salter. It is a commendable backdrop to the record.

Here is how The Beautiful Cold sounded in 2019, to entice you toward the present:

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