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I had to get two projects finished recently. These were the kind of ideas that open the door, live in your head and won't go away. So I did them. The first is a sound piece on Doric Scots, my mother tongue, almost incomprehensible to non Scots speakers, and often to me, especially the agricultural variety.

I've taken two phrases in which the speaker doesn't understand what the indeterminate other speaker is saying, in this case disnimakonysins, 'it doesn't make any sense' and  cannamakootfityersayin, 'I can't make out what you're saying' (both tracks linked in grey). The Scots speaker is saying, in Scots, what the non-Scots speaker is thinking, in English. 

​I love this stuff. It's a fight back against the onward march of linguicide, the death of a language, and believe it or not Scots indisputably is a language.

The second project is a simple field recording of me making a fire. Moving a grumpy dog, raking out the ashes, fetching the kindling, wood and anthracite and so on. No big deal, just interesting to my ears so I've shared it. It's called 
make a fire.
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I compose electroacoustic music and new music for  electric and acoustic guitars. As a sound artist my work ranges from investigations into public ritual to the sonification of climate change data to working with the voice, in particular spoken Scots. I incorporate lens-based media and text in commissioned and exhibited work relating to understandings of the complexity of landscape and the rural environment.