A hill repeating its own name.
Ben Beinn — mountain mountain — a recursive summit, a generative horizon.
Poole’s new album Ben Beinn follows 2024’s In a River Shadow, further exploring an electronic folkway rooted in the abstraction of the elemental. If the previous record moved with flowing water and submerged folk song, Ben Beinn climbs into elemental instability: passing storms, coded skies, and sodden ground.
Across the album, Poole creates a phantasmic Celtic New Age sound world that’s marked by microtonal harmony, and swelling dissonance. Voices in Gaelic, Norwegian, and English surface and dissolve, stretched beyond recognition — more weather than word.
The ten-song cycle opens with 1000, where bagpipes and strings emerge from mountain icicles and frozen streams. At its centre sits Leaf, where the skittering squelches of moss, mud, and grass form a slippery rhythmic kaleidoscope. The album closes with 365 Days of Rain, turning rainfall data into a lattice of rhythm that slips from metrical order into converging motifs.
Ben Beinn is a located listen, shaped by recordings of frozen hill passes, storms, and the granite and basalt of the West of Scotland. Rather than simply reflecting place, these recordings press against it, layering the sonic materiality of landscape with synthesis and song. The album sits at an inflection point between fabrication — folk music as performed identity, a carrier of story — and its obfuscation through digital networks, where tradition refracts into plural forms.
Reference points include the emotionally saturated textures of Inoyama Land and the folk-electronic hybrids of Eli Storbekken. It tunes biophony to the hyperrealist processes of Noah Creshevsky, drawing as much from Galen Tipton’s sonic adventures as from the disquieting simulations of James Ferraro.
Ben Beinn continues Poole’s excavation of environmental and folk material through contemporary methods. Shaped by the slow pressures of land and sky — a music of erosion, recurrence, and elemental presence.
A flowing and fluctuating record of the waterways, In a River Shadow explores the meeting points of deep time and song-time. Traditional sonic forms are refracted through hypermodern processes, with early instruments, environmental recordings, and synthetic textures acting as conduits. The result is a kind of technoid folk, where the long memory of place seeps into the immediacy of sound.
Bone flutes and bullroarers based on designs sourced from prehistoric sites across the Scottish Highlands and Isles were sounded in situ — in caves, by tidal estuaries, on moorland paths — producing tones shaped as much by water and terrain as by hand.
This sonic material was folded into an unsettling hyperreal soundworld. AI lyric processes trained on Scottish song archives (developed in collaboration with Considerate Digital) intersect with open-ended compositional strategies. The result is a kind of speculative folkway futurism — where songs emerge through entanglements of signal, memory, and place.
On Selkie of Sule Skerry, an old Orcadian ballad of between worlds, absent fathers, and the search for belonging, Poole sings underwater — layering submerged vocals with percussion made from river stones tapped, rolled, and carried by the current. The track surges with synthesis and field recordings, sometimes rushing forward with intensity, sometimes pooling into stillness — a mimicry of river flow itself.
Star of the Sea reworks a Catholic hymn into a morphing, bell-strewn invocation. What begins as a devotional surfaces as something closer to an incantation, its rhythms circling like prayer through time — compressing past and present into one shifting current.
Alongside other reworkings, such as Weila Waila, these pieces sit with more abstract compositions to form a cycle where tradition, environment, and computation don’t just meet but actively reshape one another. In a River Shadow becomes the first in a triptych, an opening gesture toward an elemental abstraction where electronics find their place within folkways — a haunted, digital folklore.
“Mindbending and caressing ambient-psychedelic-noise contortionism” – Boomkat