Post Description

Folk, Celtic, gaelic music, folk roots, Scottish, Fort William.

The way in which humans relate and respond to the physical spaces and landscapes around us can have a profound effect on both the person and the place. Such interactions are frequently described in terms of feeling a “connection” or having a “sense of place” – emotional responses that can range anywhere from deeply positive to harshly negative. These feelings can influence decision-making from an individual right up to a large-scale organisational level and can have significant consequences for the places concerned in terms of how they are treated by humans. Similarly, how a person responds to their environment can have a considerable impact on their own wellbeing.

At their core, however, these interactions are heavily influenced by our own perceptions of the world and, with that, subject to all the external and internal influences that shape our outlook. In other words, part of a person’s response to a given environment is purely a product of their own mind and everything that has shaped their way of thinking, most significantly memory and imagination.

The music in Lèirsinn originated during the periods of restricted travel brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic. Torn from the life of a travelling musician and plunged into the confinement of “lockdown” living, I became increasingly interested in this idea of the way we relate and respond to the physical spaces around us being (at least in part) shaped by the imagination. I began taking imaginary journeys to places, both those I knew well and some I didn’t know at all. With the aid of maps, written and oral accounts of human and natural histories, folklore, art and music, I’d immerse myself as fully as possible in a place and mentally escape my Covid confinement for a few hours. These imaginary journeys were so comparatively invigorating (given the mundane reality of the average day in lockdown) that I was frequently inspired to compose pieces of music in response to them.

Further into the pandemic, I enrolled on the University of the Highlands and Islands’ “Music and the Environment” Masters degree course and, looking to explore this idea further, decided to turn the imaginary journeys into a musical experiment. Once restrictions had lifted sufficiently, I made real, physical trips to some of the places visited on my imagined journeys and wrote further pieces of music inspired by these "real" visits. I then compared the pairs of compositions for each location in a bid to understand the extent to which the imagination influences our perception of place.

Translated into English as “perception”, the project’s Gaelic title, Lèirsinn, has a broad definition covering vision, sight, seeing, intellect, understanding, insight and knowledge. Importantly, both words carry meaning extending beyond that which the eye may behold – sight is but one sense through which an emotional response to an environment can be influenced. Indeed, you could say that the experiment sought to understand what may be referred to as the “inner eye” and its response to our surroundings, as much as any of the common human sensory faculties.

On his famous journey to the Western Isles in 1773, Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote that “the use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” Rather than pit imagination against reality, the conclusion I took from all this was that the two have an altogether more interdependent relationship. The imagination has no difficulty whatsoever in creating responses to places, real or fantastical, but that’s not to say that the environment itself has no influence on the matter. When encountering the places for real, I found that the imagination tended to interact with the landscape, colouring in the blanks and amplifying what perhaps lay in the landscape already. Though the imagination may be at times the dominant partner, both are the richer for each other’s contribution.

Tracks:
01 - Òran do Rùm
02 - Rum - Kinloch Castle _ Tìr nan Daoine 's Tìr nam Beathaichean
03 - Coire Mhic Fhearchair
04 - Beinn Eighe _ Ewan Robertson, Celtman
05 - Nuallan
06 - Coire Gabhail
07 - Eadar an Dà Bhràigh
08 - Creag Meagaidh Part 1. - Doire nan Dearcag _ Foreboding
09 - Creag Meagaidh Part 2. - Allt Coire Àrdair _ Lochan
10 - Creag Meagaidh Part 3. - Dìreadh _ The Plateau
11 - Glory to the Hi-Hi
12 - Cathkin Park

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5rZ7Yz1ls