Forefowk, Mind Me: My new record

PRE ORDER THE RECORD HERE
Forefowk, Mind Me is a conversation between traditions: voice and pipes, accompanied and unaccompanied, DIY and folk. It’s a record that leans into the contradictions and brings them into dialogue through traditional songs, reinterpretations, and original arrangements drawn from Scots, Gaelic, and Irish traditions. There are toasts, improvisations, poetic settings. The are pipes treated like a voice, and voice like pipes.
The name Forefowk, Mind Me plays with the idea of elders or ancestors in a Scottish context. In Scots, “mind me” is a phrase loaded with meaning—it could mean remember me, remind me, care for me, or watch me. This record is rooted in that spirit of remembering and watching over—acknowledging that our rich traditions, particularly those of Scottish Gypsy Travellers and other indigenous groups in Scotland, require continual care. They must be reconnected with, built upon, and passed on. My hope is that this music becomes a stone added to the cairn of Scots song tradition—layered on top of what has come before, and ready to be overlaid by whatever comes next.
My main muse for this work is Scots Traveller singer Lizzie Higgins, whose singing carries the influence of the piping tradition. Many tracks on the album are built around uilleann pipe melodies, with the voice used as a pipe-like element—sometimes as harmonic structure, other times as canntaireachd: the vocable-based vocal mimicry of pipes. The result is an album that moves through ideas and textures, through playful collaboration and deep listening.

The album was recorded in August 2024 at The Big Shed in Tombreck, supported by Creative Scotland. I was joined by a group of musicians whose practices stretch between contemporary experimental music, traditional playing, and early music:

• Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh (viola), whose work explores the tonal and textural range of gut strings across acoustic and amplified worlds.
  
• Oliver Pitt (duduk, bouzouki, percussion), a Glasgow-based multi-instrumentalist with roots in DIY, early music, and playful composition.
  
• Harry Górski-Brown (small pipes, violin), a composer who blends electroacoustic and traditional music.
  
• Stevie Jones (double bass), who also recorded and mixed the record, and whose long involvement in both the experimental and folk scenes in Scotland underpins his distinctive approach
  
  Alongside the music, Forefowk, Mind Me is accompanied by a short film and book, produced in collaboration with filmmaker Lizzie MacKenzie, documenting my research process and a walking residency across Argyll with my horse, Maisie. The film explores interdependent relationships between people, animals, ancestors, and the land. It captures the everyday realities of working with a horse, and the particular kind of attunement that brings—how travelling with an animal changes your senses, alters your awareness of the world around you, and reshapes time. This work sits inside the idea of tradition as a living, moving, responsive thing. Something you travel through and with.
  

Folk and DIY: Parallel Practices
My practice emerges from both the Scots folk tradition and Glasgow’s experimental DIY music scene. My previous albums were released through GLARC—a label known for its boundary-blurring, radical approach to music-making. In that space, I’ve found parallels with folk practice: we organise our own gigs, make music for each other, explore what we find interesting, and aren’t afraid to release something that’s a little scrappy.I apply the permission granted by the DIY scene to do what we like and design our own worlds. Folk reminds us to learn from what has come before. I see them as complementary, not contradictory. My work sits in the messy ground between them.​