Forty miles off the coast of Scotland lie the Outer Hebrides, an archipelago of islands whose populace have seen some harsh times yet still endure.  Over the past three decades, Cathy Lane has enjoyed a love affair with the archipelago. The Hebrides Suite is her sonic love letter to the land and people.

As a mixture of field recordings and interviews, the album has the feel of a television show without the sound.  Soon one begins to realize that the images are conjured in the mind, and perhaps appreciates the old radio shows a bit better.  Those shows captured the imagination and inspired generations to picture their own images.  While it helps to have the physical edition (with beautiful, extensive liner notes), it’s fascinating to simply listen and to be awash in sounds.  Awash is the key word, as the ocean is never far from the foreground.  Sea salt runs through the residents’ veins.

Thanks to air travel, the journey to the Hebrides is easier now than ever, but the traditional ferry still offers the most authentic experience.  Lane writes that “the sound of the announcements, the throb of the engine and the strain of ropes, the clang and scrape of the heavy metal ramp on the port as well as the culinary joys of a macaroni cheese pie are familiar to any traveler to the islands” (abbreviated).  These sounds are captured in brilliant stereo for the home listener.  Unfortunately, due to packaging challenges, no macaroni pie is included with the recording.

Less cheerful is the recounting of a historical eviction, as profits dictated the displacement of people in favor of sheep.  The event may have occurred in 1849, but it still stings.  Even a snatch of accordion recorded at a birthday party can’t undercut the sense of melancholy.  As words tumble in the tide, a dog barks, sheep bleat and metal gates crash.  The layered effect is disorienting, as if past, present and future were colliding in a wormhole.  Looped dialogue lends the collage a world-weary tone.  And more, and more, and more.  And yet the crofters and weavers display an intense pride in explaining their work.

As fascinating as the dialogue samples may be, one longs to hear more of the Hebrides itself, and Lane accommodates this need in the second half of the recording.  “Gaoth (Wind)” is particularly effective, a study in the effects of wind in various locales from beach to pen.  In the liner notes, one learns about the local opposition to a wind farm (36 turbines were eventually installed, instead of 181), but the sound of the wind tells a better story.  In “Watch Over Us All”, Lane captures the sound of Sunday morning worship, but as she writes, “the skylarks singing above the ruined 13th century church get the last word”.  The suite ends with the Hebrides itself, reminding us that the islands existed before us and will likely outlast us as well.  (Richard Allen) A Closer Listen

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“With this album, released in the Soundscape Series by Gruenrekorder, Cathy Lane declares her longstanding love affair with the Outer Hebrides. She does so without simplifying phonography into the trope of the solitary wanderer, microphone in hand  staring at the might and magnitude of nature while remaining apart. To the contrary, while there is space in all 6 tracks to be alone with nature, this nature is not at a distance but inhabited and lived: raw and harsh rhythms of weather meet those of language and bodies to produce memories in the present, spun from the pulse of life, death and the struggle for survival. No more so than in Tweed, where the body of the listener is drawn into the rhythm of work and voices, and the textures of tweed are spun from the sound of their own manufacture. This track also featured in a recent crafts council exhibition that toured between Scotland and the South East of England, a context that amplified the connection between the rhythm of work and the rhythm of music largely lost in a post industrial society and abandoned in the cerebral processes of electroacoustic composition.  My favourite track, Where Once Were Whales, creates a powerful juncture between the actual location and its musical construction. Voices from the oral history archive and those recorded by Lane talk about fishing and seafood, narrating the place through lost traditions and current customs, while compositional strategies play and expand those voices as sounds into the acoustic environment. This composed soundscape represents not a geographical actuality but invites an individual imagination triggered by clicks, ticks and waves of water that reverberate with and through the words to share a rhythm and distort into the clatter of the sea. Lane’s precise digital processing of environmental sounds and voices does not overpower the recordings but shapes them beyond the phonographic field into a composition that is at once document and site of production: generating facts and music that invent rather than confirm their origin and discipline. The electronic manipulations respond to the recordings, garnering their tonalities and augmenting their rhythms, rather than embellishing them. The delicate reverberations and punctuations answer the material rather than the conventions of music and question the possibility to translate the original field by allowing us to hear the authenticity of her particular rendition.

Lane first visited the Hebrides in the late 70s, with this current album she leads the way towards a new relationship between field recording and electroacoustic composition, inadvertently critiquing the “just stick your microphone into the field” approach while also unpacking an electroacoustic vocabulary.”

Salome Voegelin in The Wire: Adventures in Modern Music, 361, March 2014 issue.

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“I know nada about this composer, but The Hebrides Suite gathers six pieces borne of her heavily pronounced love affair with The Outer Hebrides. Gathering a wide range of field recordings and spoken dialogue from these islands, Cathy Lane aims to evoke sonic traces left by their rich history. Considering the tools at work here, this might seem like a tough call but via a series of occasionally looped voices from locals recounting their personal stories, bleating sheep, rhythmic machine clanking, lapping waves, singing churchgoers, the sounds of nature, tempered engine rumbles, melodic traces and indiscernible fluttering and rasping sounds, everything falls together perfectly. At once sentimental and celebrating life as it presently stands on the islands, The Hebrides Suite, replete with the enchanting photos adorning both the cover and the booklet inside, pays perfect testament to the magic, wonder and beauty of them.

Highly accomplished, this makes for a very rewarding listen.” RJ in  Progress Report

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“The sound artist, composer, lecturer and researcher Cathy Lane, lives and works in London. She’s Professor of Sound Arts, University of Arts London and co-directs the Sounds Creative Arts Research Practice (CRiSAP).
Cathy Lane is interested in how sound relates to the past, our stories, the environment and our collective and individual memories. In this context, she wonders how history, past lives and past events leave traces of sound and how we hear them.
The press release states that ‚The Hebrides Suite‘ is an attempt to answer this question and is the culmination of three decades involved with the Outer Hebrides by Cathy Lane that form a 130-mile long archipelago and about 40 miles off the northwest coast of Scotland.
This album consists of six tracks of one hour approximately and starts with ‚Sea Shanty‘, a ferry ride to the Outer Hebrides where we can hear the engine noise, children, adults talking and announcements in English and Gaelic. ‚On the Machair‘ it can be appreciate people talking in Gaelic and English about the life system consisting of small farms which produce small amounts of food, fishing and animal husbandry, mainly sheep. Machair is a Gaelic word that means a vast plain formed of shell sand. Very few people lives in these places. ‘Tweed’ reflects the importance that sheep has been for this land. The Harris Tweed industry has developed traditional clothing that farmers do by hand and it can be listen to a woman weaving manually. ‚Gaoth (Wind)‘. The wind is ever present in the Outer Hebrides. There was a project to install windmills but it was rejected by the Scottish government. Nowadays every inhabited run their own wind turbines. On ‚Where Once Were Whales‘ certainly we can listen to the sea and deep into the island there are the last vestiges of the wailing industry. The main local fish catches are lobster, crab and shellfish that are sold to foreign markets. On ‚Watch Over Us All‘ it can be listen to locals walking in the streets of Stornoway to the Free Church of Scotland. It’s Sunday and almost everything is closed.
For the reviewer has been very interesting to know the life and wildlife of the Outer Hebrides – distant and mysterious land – through sound.”

Guillermo Escudero | Loop

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