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.

I made bone flutes and bullroarers based on designs sourced from prehistoric sites across the Highlands and Isles, sounding them in situ — in caves, by tidal estuaries, on moorland paths — producing tones shaped as much by water and terrain as by hand. 

These raw materials are folded into a hyperreal soundworld shaped as much by terrain as by machine. AI lyric processes trained on Scottish song archives (developed in collaboration with Considerate Digital) intersect with open-ended compositional strategies drawn from experimental electronic practice. The result is a kind of speculative folkway futurism — where songs emerge through entanglements of signal, memory, and place; where melody drifts, guided as much by loch and river as by voice or hand.

On tracks like Birdhouse, voices appear in multiples — some human, some hallucinatory — like a dissonant guide trained on the hyperrealist work of Noah Creshevsky. While Star of the Sea reinterprets a Catholic hymn, turning the sea-bound devotional into its visceral drum shadow. 

In a River Shadow is not a reconstruction, but a speculative transmission: where tradition, environment, and computation distil into a haunted, digital folklore.

“Mindbending and caressing ambient-psychedelic-noise contortionism” – Boomkat