Kinbrae and Clare Archibald: Birl Of Unmap – album review

Kinbrae and Clare Archibald: Birl Of Unmap

(Full Spectrum Records)

Ltd edition cassette|DL

Released 11th February 2022

Pre-order/buy at Bandcamp

Kinbrae and Clare Archibald collaborate to bring us Birl Of Unmap. It’s a haunting, mournful collection that is inspired by the site of the long-lost Fife mining village of Lassodie. Gordon Rutherford reviews for Louder Than War.

Nestling aside the harbour in the picturesque Scottish town of Anstruther, overlooking the North Sea, sits the Scottish Fisheries Museum. It’s not particularly famous, but when I reflect on all of the museums I have visited, I cannot recall another that evokes lives long gone quite so powerfully. It’s a special place, one that absolutely brings home the travails and hardships of the people who have been dependent upon the fishing industry through the centuries. Of course, the story applies to any fishing community, anywhere in the world. It’s a tough way of life.

Life down the pit was equally tough and there are many parallels to be drawn between the two industries. Birl Of Unmap, the new album from Kinbrae and Clare Archibald concerns itself with the latter, but these tales of toil are easily transferable. Not too far away from Anstruther is the lost village of Lassodie. A mining community, it effectively died in the 1930’s when it was deemed uneconomical to continue production. Miners and their families were given fourteen days by the pit owners to evacuate the company owned houses. With one stroke of a pen, a village was erased from the map. Since that tragic event, the site of Lassodie has had a chequered story. Having flirted with open cast mining for spells in the sixties and nineties, a new lease of life was granted to the site in 2003 when the international landscape artist and cultural theorist Charles Jenks was commissioned by the mine owners, Scottish Resources Group, to regenerate the area. Ten years later the project collapsed when SRG went into administration. Now, half finished, this ill-fated site is once again ghostly and largely uninhabited except for a few hardy dog walkers.

“But we’re here for the tunes”, I hear you cry. “This is supposed to be an album review, not a lecture on the recent history of The Kingdom of Fife. Tell us what the album is like.” Dear reader, I already have. Just as the Scottish Fisheries Museum brings the past to life, Birl Of Unmap vividly conjures the industrial ghosts of yesteryear thanks to spectral, textured waves of sound, accompanied by voices that seem to come from centuries ago to carry messages from our ancestors.

Kinbrae is the musical project of the Edinburgh and Fife based twin brothers, Andy and Mike Truscott and Birl Of Unmap is their third full length album. It follows on the heels of their fine 2019 release, Landforms. This time, however, they have company. Clare Archibald is a writer, artist and photographer who brings an incredibly ability to fuse words together along with an unconventional visual eye. Check out her intriguingly blurry late night photographs of lights along Fife’s shoreline and distant oil rigs to see what I mean. Archibald’s unique perspective and lyrical skill combine perfectly with Kinbrae’s perceptive and emotive instrumentation and field recordings to create an album that educes its location perfectly.

Birl Of Unmap is, for the vast majority of the time, an album that is inspired by the site formerly known as Lassodie. The album begins and ends with a track containing the word ‘excavation’ in its title, and that’s wholly appropriate. For what Kinbrae and Archibald do brilliantly is to peel back layers of history to unearth the rich seam of stories that lie beneath. The perfect example of this is the album’s stand out track, Undersouls. It is so tragic, like a vessel carrying the entire world’s broken hearts. The track features a spoken word chronicle from an octogenarian former miner who has lived locally all of his life. In his wonderfully sing-song east coast inflection, Alex Black recites poetry that he has memorised from his visits to Fife’s folk clubs. He also talks about the hardships and the perils of life down the pit and yet, in the telling, his voice has a beautifully rhythmic lilt to it. It’s almost as though he is recalling those days with fondness. He narrates this tale atop the most wonderful brass arrangement, which serves to provide a nostalgic backdrop to those words. In an interview with Spam Zine, Mike Truscott described how, upon hearing the spoken word over the original demo, he imagined the track as a “eulogy being delivered to mourn the loss of the pit and the village itself”. Assisted by guest musician Sebastian Selke’s magnificent cello, he has captured that superbly.

Undersouls is not a one-off. This entire collection of haunting soundscapes is excellent throughout. The analogue richness of Mike Truscott’s brass and Selke’s mournful cello combines perfectly with Andy Truscott’s textual layers of electronic sound. This is perfectly illustrated by the track chosen by Kinbrae and Archibald to blaze the trail for Birl Of Unmap. Peer is a wonderfully moving, atmospheric piece which showcases Mike Truscott’s sorrowful cornet quite beautifully. Similarly, on the ethereal Haul Into Being, Andy Truscott picks out the most delicate lines on his piano over atmospheric synth waves. It’s as fragile as porcelain.

As we walk through this album, this journey created for us by Kinbrae and Clare Archibald, we are transported to that landscape. In our minds, all of the elements knit together to create this wonderfully vivid tapestry of life in an industrial setting, but one surrounded by the green rolling hills and dense forests that are full of life. Of course, Kinbrae are past masters at utilising location as inspiration for their music. Their 2016 debut, Tidal Patterns, was a collection inspired by Andy Truscott’s time living on the remote Hebridean island of Coll, whilst Landforms explored the glory of the silvery Tay.

However, on Birl Of Unmap they seem to reach another level in evoking that sense of place and so much of that is surely down to the contribution of Archibald. For all the musical brilliance, the highlight of Birl Of Unmap is the voices; those haunting intonations that sound as though they have been released from a time capsule that was buried under the soil at Lassodie many decades ago. From out of the ether, they come at you. Soothing, gentle, melodic. Memorable. Archibald’s voice features alongside voices from local people with their wonderfully rich and tuneful Fife dialect. Carbide Fizz is quite wonderful in this regard. Featuring the words of another octogenarian, Peggy Crawford, who is Lassodie’s eldest remaining former resident, it is a story told with utter authenticity.

There is no doubt that Archibald’s love of words, along with her skill in writing them, have made a significant contribution to the evolution of Kinbrae. Those recorded spoken word pieces bring a different dimension to bear on their music. But, critically, it’s not to the detriment of the music. The existence of the voices actually enhances our enjoyment of the music as opposed to distracting us from it. The music serves the words whilst the words serve the music and together they create something special.

Birl Of Unmap is a unique album and I guarantee that, once listened to, it will live long in the mind. The key word there, however, is listened. I’m re-treading old ground, but ambient music still has this image of existing to fill in the background. Birl Of Unmap won’t work on that basis. This is an album that should be – that deserves to be – listened to attentively. Rest assured, it’s worth it.

~

Kinbrae can be found here. They are also on Facebook and Twitter.

Clare Archibald can be found here and on Twitter. 

Full Spectrum Records can be found here. They are also on Twitter and Facebook.

~

All words by Gordon Rutherford. More writing by Gordon can be found in his archive.

Gordon is also on twitter as @R11Gordon and has a website here: https://thedarkflux.com

Source: louderthanwar.com