Real World Records

On various levels this is an extraordinary album. The charismatic fiddler/bagpiper/dance innovator has endured an horrendous couple of years battling with cancer, and Grit - born of pain, passion, emotion and a very real sense of roots - is the emmense response. Paradoxically it's tender yet explosive; ancient and futuristic; beautiful yet violent; scarred yet triumphant; quietly reflective yet full-on dance.... Remarkable stuff.

Press review from: fRoots (UK)

"It took a purposeful artist to make this challenging album. We are the richer for it. Quite, quite remarkable."

Press review from: Bullit (UK)

Here, his mystical samples of Scottish travellers and Gaelic west coast singers fuse with block rocking beats to create something fascinating and unexpected...

Press review from: Boys Toys (UK)

After two semi-classic albums with Bothy Culture and Hardland, this is perhaps the most powerful, defiant, deeply emotional album of the year. Made in the midst of a battle with cancer, Bennett digs deep into the Scottish tradition to sample travellers and Gaelic singers, catapulting them into the modern world with thrilling beats and full-on techno. The results are mostly outstanding.

Press review from: Mojo (UK)

album review

You'll see that Martyn Bennett has come top of the list once more. He's a genius, without doubt, and he's taken his talents to an even higher plane with his new album, Grit. As he has done in the past, he's found songs and words in the School of Scottish Studies and put them to electronic rhythms. He's used two different voices - the voice of the Roma (travellers) and the voice of the Gael.

...there's nothing sweet about Grit. Bennett has taken the strongest, deepest, and most fundamental sounds and brought them to the fore - like the last cry of a wild beast, without translation, without gentrification. The Roma provide the strongest voices on the album, but listen to Liberation for a unique Gaelic psalm - which uses the singing of Murdina and Effie Macdonald from the 60s and the low, gravelly voice of Michael Marra reading Psalm 118 in English.

There is no-one else on earth so modern and so ancient at the same time: so true to our roots and so free in creating new sounds - and new languages.

Press review from: The Scotsman (Scotland)

album review

Here...Martyn has created something wondrous in terms of sound picture, genuinely breathtaking in its scope, imagination and execution and, most important, very very personal. Martyn’s innovatory approach is recognisable everywhere you listen and, though perennially challenging, supremely rewarding. In the final analysis, Grit‘s emotionally charged sequence of tone-poems is a cathartic and wholly truthful representation of Martyn’s “own reflection in the great mirror of all cultures”; it’s truly extraordinary, and – no exaggeration – without doubt an album of the year.

Press review from: www.netrhythms.co.uk (internet)

album review

Grit is Martyn Bennett's tour de force.

No-one else welds the Scottish tradition to cutting edge electronica so well and here you couldn't slide an atom between the elements, so well are they interwoven.

Potentially controversial and challenging in its groove-clad modernity, the album has gained the delighted approval of the singers' families, who see it as continuing the tradition. Knowing that Grit represents Bennett's survival strategy during a particularly harrowing period in his own struggle with cancer makes sense of the intensity, the deeply personal yet hugely accessible emotion in this album. Do it the service of listening with headphones. It's an astounding experience, simultaneously painful and uplifting. This is a man with a huge voice.

Press review from: BBCi (UK)

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''Just as we near the time for nailing albums of the year here's a late entry that should force it's way to the top of any self-respecting Scottish music fan's list... a triumphant blast... from one of our most influencial talents...''

Press review from: The List (Scotland)

album review

Quite captivating for it's uniqueness, this extraordinary project blends traditional Scottish music with an inventive avalanche of beats and samples from the world of electronica and dance. Simultaneously rooted in the passionate purity of the past while glorying in modern dance culture, it's the amazing voices of traditional singers like Jeannie Robertson, LIzzie Higgins and Flora McNeil that ultimately dominate.

Press review from: Wave (UK)

Genre-defying genius from Scotland

'This is a truly astonishing record....Tracks are split between Roma influences and the Gaelteachd traditions of the Hebrides - for many the 'real' folk culture of Scotland. Sources were snatched from dusty vinyl records, some from right back in the 50s, and sonically reinterpreted into a modern dance hybrid....I really can't recommend this album enough, not only for its genre-defying vision, but also for the strength and courage of its maker. You are unlikely to hear a more powerful and passionate disc this year - in any genre.'

Press review from: SongLines (UK)

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A sonic collage of archive and vintage recordings from the Scots and Gaelic traditions, integrated with Bennett's trademark contemporary dance beats. This intense and often very moving collection is carried by the monumental voices...those jewels are timeless.

Press review from: Scotland on Sunday (Scotland)

album review

Caledonian techno-folkie Bennett certainly makes an impression...this music has an undeniable sense of place, very much making it roots music for the 21st century.

...he made Grit with the use of samples and lengthy fragments of old recordings made mostly in the 1950s by traditional singers...Their voices are strikingly beautiful and the variety of settings engages constantly...Among many amazing moments, the most gripping has to be the gruesome and awesome ten minutes of Storyteller.

Press review from: HMV Choice (UK)

CD review

Martyn Bennett attempts to reclaim Scottish music from the "misty-lensed and fanciful" representations of Celtic culture that have flourished in recent years. His method is to go back to roots, using samples of traditional Scottish folk singers such as Lizzie Higgins and Flora MacNeil, and his own fiddle and pipe drones alongside modern synth and drum programmes....the striking voices lending the tracks a stirring, earthy quality - never more so than on the opening "Move", in which the eerie tones of Sheila Stewart are lashed to an 808 bassline and crunching breakbeats, streaked with trumpet and ney flute. An absorbing reconciliation of the raw and the cooked.

Press review from: The Independent (UK)

album review- Rick Anderson

Ever since Martin Swan's Mouth Music project sputtered to a disappointing halt around 2000, there has been a hole in the music world that's been waiting to be filled by someone else willing to take unabashedly traditional Scottish music and juxtapose it with unashamedly slamming breakbeats and 21st-century production techniques.

Martyn Bennett has actually been working that territory since his eponymous debut in 1996, but has really come into his own in the years since; Grit is a tour de force of avant-folk fusion music on which he manages to craft irresistibly hip-shaking beats and bring them to bear on traditional material without sacrificing any of the stark beauty of his source material.

"Chanter" is a simultaneous celebration of house music, bagpipe technique and the Scottish vocal tradition of puirt a beul; "Nae Regrets" samples an old man singing what sounds like a variation on the bawdy song "Bonny Black Hare", and throws it in with metal-edged guitars, orchestral strings and a Big Beat rhythm that would make Fatboy Slim weep all over his decks; the aptly titled "Rant" makes exquisitely intricate use of layered and rhythmically manipulated vocal samples, dubwise sound manipulation and a Shetland fiddle. On 'Wedding", Bennett creates a minimalist but richly textured quilt of sound with an altered fiddle, Gaelic spoken-word samples and, eventually, a simple one-two beat. That last track is more interesting than fun, but the rest of the album comes down solidly on the latter side. Brilliant.

Press review from: www.allmusic.com (International)