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Machrihanish Bay is a wide, sweeping tract of sand just north of the Mull of Kintyre. It’s a remote place, the haunt of seabirds and the occasional intrepid tourist, a place where the importance of human history seems to recede and the present looms long and large. I went there twice, thirty years ago, when I was eleven, but hearing Rachel Newton’s Machrihanish Bay, a standout track from her new album Sealladh, opened up a wellspring of memories. Of course, it takes more than a field recording of some birds and the splash of some waves to accurately convey the feel of a particular place, but Newton manages with the most minimal, gentle of ingredients – delicate harp and a soft background cello hum – to build a perfectly evocative soundworld.
The inspiration behind Newton’s trip to Machrihanish – and behind a number of other tracks on Sealladh – is the painter William McTaggart. McTaggart was born just up the road in Campbeltown in 1835 and developed a painting style that was like a rough-hewn, sea-bitten form of impressionism. A quintessential McTaggart painting, The Storm, is the basis for one lovely, flighty harp piece here. One of his most stunning works is Quiet Sunset, Machrihanish, whose title says more than you might at first think. How can a sunset be anything other than quiet? It’s as if McTaggart was working from a mildly synaesthetic viewpoint, with colour and shape being transformed into sound. Newton’s second song about Machrihanish, named after this painting, is a series of subtly shifting repetitions, the harp cradled by soft keys and Alice Aleen’s cello. It somehow translates the stillness of its subject into a fluid, moving sound-vignette.
Such strange, new ways of seeing and of hearing are key to understanding Sealladh. The album grew out of a commission Newton undertook for the National Galleries of Scotland, celebrating live music programming in gallery spaces, so the idea of a link between visual and aural experience is important here. Newton’s method was to focus on specific artists and their relationship to place, culture or history. So, as well as McTaggart, there is a group of pieces inspired by Scottish-Irish artist Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852-1936), whose four embroideries The Entrance, The Stress, Despair, and The Victory – linked each give their names to a track on Sealladh. They are short pieces, used to introduce, link, or conclude, but are beautiful in their own right. The Entrance is like the extended chime of a sunrise; The Stress is full of flutterings and melodic hints; Despair is full of disconcerting synths; The Victory is forceful and bright, understandably celebratory, but not without melancholy.
The gaelic concept of Sealladh refers literally to vision, but there are a wealth of deeper meanings and abstract interpretations surrounding the word: it contains, for example, the idea of vastness, spectacle and panorama, as well as an element of the supernatural. The wild landscapes of Celtic countries are often tied up with Christian and pre-Christian religiosity, and one artist who captured the mythic-religious elements that still existed in rural Scotland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was John Duncan. Like Traquair, he was a leading light in the Celtic Revival, and his paintings provide another source of inspiration for Newton. His visual language was one of symbolism; his paintings of mythic stories, Celtic saints, and Arthurian legends were full of definition and finality but marked by a certain strangeness. Unusual colours and impossible postures. White peacocks and inquisitive seals. Electrically charged hair and chalky, sexless bodies. Duncan’s work Saint Bride, which shows the titular saint being carried to Bethlehem by two angels, attended by the aforementioned seal and some immaculate gulls, provides grist for a beautiful song of the same name. Newton sings in Gaelic with a sweet, dreamlike quality perfectly suited to the tumbling, liquid harp.
Deirdre of the Sorrows is based on a little-known chalk drawing by Duncan; its tragic subject is perfectly mirrored in the slow, irrevocable tread of a minimal, synthesised drum beat, while Newton’s singing is full of grace and gravity. Angus Og, God of Love and Courtesy, Putting a Spell of Summer Calm on the Sea, is a wonderfully serene piano piece, its edges washed by Grant Anderson’s perfectly pitched field recordings, with Newton’s voice surfacing unexpectedly, as if from half-sleep.
Perhaps the album’s most moving moments, however, come with two more McTaggart-inspired songs. The Sailing of the Emigrant Ship has the feel of an ancient lay about it, just Newton’s haunting voice over a swaying drone before the final moments are studded by pinpricks of harp. It is a captivating, gorgeous song. Harvest Moon, lit by the glow of nostalgia without being overly sentimental, is the album’s parting gift. It highlights Newton’s gift for subsuming visual reference points within a musical purview, coming up with melodies that are disarming, deceptively simple and utterly beautiful.
Sealladh is released on 31 May 2024 via Hudson Records.
Pre-order here: https://hudsonrecords.ffm.to/sealladh
