The sea winds blow in something very special from Gnoss.

Release Date : 9th May 2025

Label : Blackfly Records

Format : digital

All due attention

If I were to be brutally honest, I am not really yer man for singles and shouting about them, so it needs a fair old head of steam to break pattern and do so. It does happen though, from time to time, and this is one time where it’s due the attention, and now, rather than awaiting any later parent album.

Gnoss are no strangers to ATB, always bringing a cheer to the cry of, at least, this writer, proving both a tonic on the turntable and a failsafe in the field. Currently embarked on their biggest tour to date, it’s grand they have some new to regale their ever expanding audience with. All players at the top of their game, with feet across various platforms outside the quartet, it can only be time before this is the combination they are the best or better known for.

Aidan Moodie juggles also his role with Mànran and Craig Baxter his with TRIP, whereas Graham Rorie has projects both under his own name and together with Rory Matheson. If Connor Sinclair seems the one left out, with too much spare time, you can forget that, such is he in demand for his prizewinning bagpiping, an instrument he rarely touches in Gnoss. Busy boys, then.

Indigent….

HJOP, which sticks to what seems to be a Northern Isle fondness for the upper case, sticks to the aural template they work best. As to what it means, they don’t say, but my best guess might be that it is a variant of the old Norse word, “Hóp”, This means a shallow bay, or just the sort of arrival destination any Viking longboat might choose, as a’marauding they went. No doubt I will be soon corrected, should my guess be too fanciful. If, on their last album, they pursued the limits of electro-acoustic music, here the emphasis is more dialled around to maximise the sonic possibilities of the studio. Working newly with studio engineer, Stuart Hamilton, at Castlesound Studios, the band were in awe of what additional textures he could find across their instrumental heft. Overall production, once more, comes from John Lowrie, from the band, Staran.

…And PECULIAR SWAGGER

With two Orcadians in the band, there is always that peculiar swagger, indigent to those isles, present as a constant across their sound. I am told it relates to the often horizontal wind. Written by fiddle man, Rorie, one of the two, with Moodie, from Orkney, it sweeps in on a coastal breeze layered by slow keyboards, before a flourish of fiddle sets the tone.

As Baxter’s bodhran sets up an appealing pitter patter, so the flute, from Sinclair, combines with the fiddle, weaving in a sense of arrival. All the while there is a build of atmosphere, as the goatskin and guitars hurry it along, not too fast, but just enough, a journey rather than a race. Rorie adds some electric tenor guitar to Moodie’s acoustic, for greater substance. It is a warm melody, reminiscent of when the sun warms an otherwise cold wind. And then it ends, replete, it feeling a privilege to have borne witness.

With no show-off look-at-me on parade, this is what Gnoss do, making their mastery sound elementary, whereas the reality is a few letters different, the band exemplars of elemental.

See what you think:

Here’s that tour, too:

Gnoss online : website / facebook / x / instagram

Keep up with At The Barrier: Facebook / X (formerly Twitter) / Instagram / Spotify / YouTube