V.A. Mac-talla Nan Creag

Over 10,000 years ago, after the last Ice Age, humans began to explore and settle the place now known as Scotland. Evidence of our ancestors can be found in the various rock carvings, standing stones, tombs and dwellings still scattered throughout the lands today. Modern archaeological techniques can offer ever more detailed suggestions as to what these monuments might have meant, but it is still largely left to our imaginations to discern just what these spaces were used for.

In this spirit, Firecracker Recordings were approached by Forestry Commission Scotland to make something that might capture the feel of these places. They assembled a crack squad of artists (Lord Of The Isles, Other Lands, House Of Traps, Wounded Knee) whom they felt would embrace the challenge, thanks to their shared interest in their own Highland ancestries.

Visiting a handful of sites in an intense period of exploration late in 2014, they took field recordings, drank whisky, jammed in the ruins of brochs, studied rock art, sat in iron age forts, drank whisky, drove for many miles and generally began the process of channelling the shamanic forces (drank whisky) whose presence can still be felt all around.

This album is the result of that brief adventure. The artists worked both together and in isolation, quickly and effortlessly, manipulating the recordings taken from the source and combining them with their own compositions, inspired by both the sights they saw in this time and those they have imagined from another.

Here, they merge modern technologies with traditional instruments and the human voice to conjure up these ancient rites of celebration, ritual, offerings to long forgotten gods, changes in the features of the earth and the universe and the cycles of time.

Accompanying the music is a booklet of archaeological images created by Forestry Commission Scotland, detailing some of the sites around which the music is based, again utilising modern laser scanning technology to see these mysterious relics in a different light.