Ben Beinn
Pentacle / Distributed by Rubadub
Ben Beinn [mountain mountain]
A hill repeating its own name.
Poole’s new album Ben Beinn follows 2024’s In a River Shadow, further exploring an electronic folkway rooted in abstraction. While the previous record moves with flowing water and submerged song, Ben Beinn climbs into elemental instability through passing storms, coded skies, and sodden ground.
Ben Beinn is located in the land, shaped by field recordings of the West of Scotland. Rather than reflecting the place, these recordings press against it, layering the sonic materiality of landscape with synthesis and song.
Poole creates a phantasmic Celtic New Age sound world, 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, bagpipes and strings emerging from mountain icicles and frozen streams. Leaf sits central in the album, an unstable ground of squelching moss and mud forming a slippery rhythmic kaleidoscope. Ben Beinn closes with 365 Days of Rain, shifting rainfall data into a lattice of rhythm that slips from metrical order.
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 from Galen Tipton’s sonic adventures and the disquieting simulations of James Ferraro.
Shaped by the slow pressures of land and sky, Ben Beinn continues Poole’s excavation of environmental and folk material through contemporary methods.
In a River Shadow
Pentacle / Distributed by Rubadub
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 abstracted, with early instruments, environmental recordings, and synthetic textures acting as conduits.
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.
Folded into a hyperreal soundworld, the result is a kind of speculative folkway futurism, where songs emerge through entanglements of this sonic material.
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.
Star of the Sea reworks a Catholic hymn into a morphing, bell-strewn invocation. Alongside other reimaginings, such as Weila Waila, they form a cycle where tradition, environment, and computation meet and reshape one another.
