Alasdair Roberts, Amble Skuse & David McGuinness are delighted to launch their new album 'What News' at The Glad Cafe on Tuesday 27th March. With special guest Cucina Povera.

ALASDAIR ROBERTS, AMBLE SKUSE & DAVID McGUINNESS

Acclaimed Scottish folk musician Alasdair Roberts, electronic musician Amble Skuse and pianist David McGuinness present 'What News', an album in which the trio deliver surprising, moving and idiosyncratic versions of eight traditional Scottish ballads. The album was recorded by Neil McDermott at the University of Glasgow Recital Room, mixed with Calum Malcolm, mastered by Sam Smith and is released in March on the Drag City label.

Completely eschewing his customary acoustic guitar and aside from a couple of outbreaks of electric guitar, here Alasdair concentrates exclusively on the vocal aspect of his art. He delivers his finest, most considered set of traditional song interpretations to date, from the tender keen of 'Long A-Growing' to the forceful holler of 'Johnny o' the Brine'. Amble employs a wide range of electronic approaches throughout, her masterfully subtle contributions to 'Rosie Anderson' contrasting starkly with the near-overwhelming sonic maelstrom of the ten-minute epic 'Clerk Colven'. And David delivers some fiercely imaginative and diverse pianistic arrangements, encompassing the assured stridency of 'The Dun Broon Bride', the drifting mystery of 'Young Johnstone' and many points in between.

While the traditional source material (passed on from Scottish singers such as Betsy Whyte, Jock Duncan, Jean Redpath, Alex Campbell and Alasdair's late father Alan Roberts) may be of some antiquity, Alasdair, Amble and David's approaches to these eight ballads are defiantly forward-thinking. In the union of their disparate approaches, the three individual musicians manage to reconfigure these centuries-old narratives of love, death, venery and treachery into something extremely fresh and unprecedented, delivering a work of considerable depth, nuance and emotional heft.

“It's been quite a while since I've been so enthralled by an album... Alasdair has never sung better nor more fearlessly, yet with subtlety, gravity and beauty. The arrangements written and played by keyboard genius David McGuinness and Amble Skuse work perfectly with the ballads. What News is a triumph – a masterpiece; a powerful and intriguing album that demands and holds your attention. Album of the Year? Album of the Decade, I'd say!” - Shirley Collins

CUCINA POVERA

Cucina Povera is the musical project of Glasgow-based Maria Rossi. Named after a style of southern Italian traditional cooking associated with precarity and making-do, a philosophy of simplicity and stoicism that applies perfectly to the spare but beautiful music Rossi experiments with. Cucina Povera's debut album 'Hilja', released at the end of January 2018 on Night School Records, marries minimal synth, field recordings and the hymnal dexterity of Rossi’s vocal performances to create a new language, sometimes literally, to be spoken in some mythological Fourth World we’ve yet to create.

Originally from Finland, Rossi brings an acute sense of space, surroundings, and practicality to her working practice, with each composition often relying on a limited sound palette to create deeply affecting messages which transcend language. Cucina Povera’s power is to communicate purely, often down to the solo-choir nature of Rossi’s multi-layered voice, an achingly beautiful instrument which has seems to have an innate spirituality in its grain. The tension between the means and the end is at the heart of Cucina Povera, the invocation of a kind of secular spirituality at times using nothing but Rossi’s voice.

For music often minimal and simple there’s a boldness that belies the status of 'Hilja' as a debut. Rossi allows each word, each sound and rhythm to exist in its own space, finding its own relationship with its surroundings. 'Mesikämmenen Veisu' is perhaps the most ecclesiastical sounding composition here; burbling water trickles below a virtuoso vocal, with incredible arrangements in several registers undulating above. A meditation to relieve hunger and restriction, it’s a perfect summing up of 'Hilja', a music ambient but completely earthed, finding enchantment in what you have to hand, the realism of magic, the magic of realism.

“Hilja is one of the most striking debuts I've heard in some time, an album of rare beauty and conceptual rigour. Rossi loops and layers her vocals over minimal synths and environmental recordings, but the music remains fluid and amorphous, never falling into rote repetition.” - Stewart Smith, The List