The duo of Scottish folk musician Alasdair Roberts and Norwegian experimental musician Fredrik Rasten fuses their respective work with traditional music, folk song and microtonal minimalism. Their first encounter was in the septet Alasdair Roberts & Völvur, which released the LP The Old Fabled River on Drag City Records in 2021.The record combined Roberts’s compositions with versions of Scottish and Norwegian traditional songs.

 

On Seven Weathers, their forthcoming double album for Drag City Records, Roberts and Rasten focus on traditional Scottish narrative ballads, typically of long duration, where slowly evolving musical materials build up throughout the strophic verse-structure to emphasise the storytelling. They choose ballads with care, favouring time-transcending narrative themes that both bear witness to the day and age of their origin and are relevant to our times, be that

politically, culturally or ethically. Both sing and play a variety of acoustic and electronic instruments, Roberts’s clear and unadorned vocal delivery blending with Rasten’s sensibilities of just intonation tuning and timbral qualities of sound.