Heartfelt responses to Highland landscapes from Mairearad Green and Lauren MacColl

Releases this month from two established figures on the Scottish folk scene couldn’t be more different in approach, yet each represents a heartfelt response to a landscape and its history.

Accordionist, piper, singer – and, it transpires, landscape painter – Mairearad Green enlists very contemporary electronics to celebrate the rugged beauty of her native Coigach Peninsula in Wester Ross, as well as its strong women, with a clutch of five limited-edition 12-inch singles, each with a bespoke cover painting by her, while Lauren MacColl espouses traditional fiddle at its purest, captured in a village hall. Both women are re-embracing Highland life after years in Glasgow.

Hearth, titled to symbolise “the warmth, light and nourishment of art and music combined,” is the most ambitious project yet for Green, a seasoned musician and composer who also performs regularly with Anna Massie, King Creosote and others. It is also, she says, the most rewarding and personal: “It’s the first time I’ve combined my painting with my music at that level. But also, to research my family history and discover more about the women and celebrate the lives they lived through my art has been such a privilege. I’ve loved every minute of making it.”

She recorded the album in January in Ullapool, where she now lives. It was produced by multi-instrumentalist Mike Vass, under whose direction Green’s accordion and pipes have been strikingly manipulated and layered electronically, as in the multi-tracked vocals and pulses of the first song, Carry Me There. “I wanted to play everything myself and Mike is a great whizz at manipulating things. The accordion was used a lot as a drum kit really, so there are lots of sounds that you might not recognise as an accordion.”

Going through old family photographs with her mother, Green learned about her great-grandmother, Jessie, originally from the Black Isle, “who wasn’t initially accepted in Coigach because she wore skirts above her ankles and didn’t speak Gaelic. These stories speak to something in me,” she says, adding that the doughty Jessie earned the respect of the locals by speedily learning Gaelic.

Green, who paints mostly in acrylic and outdoors – “I like getting the weather on the page” – also drew the pen and charcoal landscape that adorns the sleeve of Landskein, the album by Lauren MacColl, an old friend and sometime musical colleague. As a founder member of the fiddle quartet RANT and the Salt House trio, McColl, who lives in Strathnairn to the east of Loch Ness, is accustomed to playing and composing complex music, not least her acclaimed suite The Seer, informed by the lore of her native Black Isle. Here, however, she touches base with a poised and affectionate solo performance (bar some considerate accompaniments by pianist James Ross) of airs from the great Highland fiddle collections.

She recorded the album in Abriachan village hall, a small but acoustically rich location which resonates in her music history, as she credits it with being the first place she can recall hearing what she calls the “elemental power” of unaccompanied fiddle.“It does feel like a return to what makes me tick, what got me interested in the whole thing in the first place – just these beautiful melodies which captured my attention from a really young age, and which I continue to go back to, even if I’m writing new music.” And that feeling for these old tunes shines from the opening paean to Ben Wyvis, Air Mullach Beinn Fhuathais, as it unfolds eloquently over a simple harmonium drone.

In an essay on MacColl’s website, the ethnologist Mairi McFadyen defines the term “landskein” as “a thread or yarn in which the lifelines of a landscape, people, stories and memories are richly intertwined” – MacColl’s included – and quotes appositely from novelist Neil Gunn’s Butcher’s Broom: “Distilled out of this landscape is a music that is singular and memoried as dark brown honey.”

The Hearth singles are available only from www.mairearadgreen.co.uk See also www.laurenmaccoll.co.uk

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