Arun Sood & Angeline Morrison announce forthcoming collaborative album Donn/Dubh

Released today, the album’s opening track and lead single, ‘A Rìbhinn a Bheil Cuimhn’ Agad’, offers a first glimpse into a twelve-track collection spanning electro-folk, ambient, drone, dub and spoken word.

Donn/Dubh (Black/Brown) pays homage to Sood and Morrison’s shared Hebridean heritage. Sounding at once spiritual yet non-traditional, folk melodies are exploded into fragments then reassembled anew, allowing the artists to explore their complex relationship to musical heritage, tradition, landscape and belonging.

The inspiration behind Donn/Dubh lies in 10th-century Celtic texts in which the direction of winds corresponded to different colours. Inspired by this idea, Sood spent years researching colours in traditional Gaelic song archives, reworking melodies into new compositions and layering drones of traditional Scottish instrumentation with bass-heavy beats, lush synth lines, abrasive guitars and ambient soundscapes brought to life by the forward-thinking production of Alastair Smith.

Morrison’s deeply spiritual vocals grace several tracks as she embraces her practice of “mythopoeic singing”, whereby the spectral presence of marginalised Black and Brown figures from the past are brought to life and invited into the present, as the artists hold commune with their ancestors, of the land and of lineage.

On the lead single, ‘A Rìbhinn a Bheil Cuimhn’ Agad’, Morrison begins by asking, “brown girl do you hear me?” (“‘s a ghruagach dhonn, an cluinn thu mi?”) — a searching refrain heard faintly over a pulsing bass that sounds like a spectral heartbeat echoing over the pastoral tones of reverb-laden flutes. The accompanying video follows Sood and Morrison as they traverse land and sea, compass in hand, in search of the spectral figures and landscapes of their shared past. In the vein of Real World Records icon Martyn Bennett, the duo pushes the boundaries of folk music to new limits.

Following the release of their critically acclaimed solo albums in 2022, Sood and Morrison formed a friendship and collaboration through their shared attachment to experimental and psych-folk, as well as Gaelic song cultures. Morrison’s groundbreaking album The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience illuminated the often-overlooked Black British presence within the folk canon and was hailed as The Guardian‘s Folk Album of the Year. Released in the same year, Sood’s experimental ambient-folk album Searching Erskine featured as a Guardian Album of the Month and was described by Elizabeth Alker (BBC Radio 3 / Unclassified) as “fragments of memories spoken and images conjured through sound and field recordings, strings and electronics and tape loops that ebb and swirl like the tide.”

With a combined heritage spanning Scotland, Jamaica and India, the artists have come to think of themselves as ‘Brown Hebrideans’, encapsulating their liminal, muddied connection to Gaelic song cultures and the Scottish Gaeltacht. Across the twelve tracks of Donn/Dubh, they seek to rekindle this connection while embracing a plurality of musical lineages, ranging from traditional Gaelic song to dub, drone and electronica.

Sood and Morrison are currently preparing an extended and immersive live iteration of the album, featuring archival visuals, live analogue instrumentation, electronics and vocals; while Morrison is also set to play a string of live dates including the Nest Collective Campfire Club, Tower Of London, (26 June); the Nest Collective Campfire Club, Brighton (27 June); Deerhshed Festival (24 July); and Saltburn Folk Festival (7 August).

Donn/Dubh is out 7 August on Real World X and available to pre-order on limited edition earth-brown vinyl. ‘A Rìbhinn a Bheil Cuimhn’ Agad’, the first single from the album, is out now.

Pre-order the album