Glasgow-based musician Quinie (Josie Vallely) announces her third album, ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’, described as ‘folk tradition in motion’, and premieres the video for lead single ‘Macaphee Turn the Cattle’.
Our readers and listeners may well be familiar with Glasgow-based musician Quinie (Josie Vallely), who has appeared in several Mixtapes here on KLOF over the years, beginning with her 2018 album Buckie Prins, the follow-up to her sell-out eponymous 2017 debut. Quinie has also appeared in the Betwixt & Between Tapes series, the half-hour “split-artist” cassette tapes organised by London-based banjo player Jacken Elswyth (reviewed here).
Quinie’s third album, Forefowk, Mind Me, will be released on 23rd May on Upset The Rhythm (pre-order here). To celebrate the album launch, Quinie will perform at St Pancras Old Church on Friday, 30th May, at 7:30 PM (Tickets available via Dice here).
A singer working from the Scots song tradition, Quinie brings an approach that is both reverent and radical—exploring authenticity not as an exercise in preservation, but as something lived, questioned, and continually reshaped.
Forefowk, Mind Me is a conversation between traditions: voice and pipes, accompanied and unaccompanied, DIY and folk. It features a mix of traditional unaccompanied songs, reinterpretations, and original arrangements drawn from Scots, Gaelic, and Irish traditions, alongside toasts, improvisations, and poetic settings. Rather than static and fixed, it’s folk tradition in motion.
Quinie’s main muse is Scots Traveller Singer Lizzie Higgins, who was heavily influenced by the piping tradition. Many of the tracks use uilleann pipe melodies as their architecture. The voice is used as a pipe-like element, at times taking on the role of a harmonic, at others as call-and-response canntaireachd (pipe melody sung using vocables) that blurs the boundary between instrument and singer. The album rejects the virtuosity often focussed on in contemporary traditional music, instead building on worlds of ideas and playful collaboration.
To mark the album announcement, watch the video for Macaphee Turn the Cattle (single out now) below. This well-known pipe and fiddle tune, Mrs MacLeod of Raasay, a.k.a. Mac-a-Phì, appears to have been used as comical mouth music in both Gaelic and English. This is based on Lizzie Higgins’ version, which she learned from her mother and possibly evolved from a Gaelic original.
Quinie shared:
This is a playful song that has made its way down from the Gaelic tradition into a Scots language version. It’s become almost mouth music, but there is a story in there – about a chaotic moving of cattle, and losing your cows into the wrong Fields. It also talks about the shieling, which is a tradition in Scottish culture where crofters or farmers would take their animals up to higher pastures during the summer months to benefit from the richness of the grass and have a good old time up in the hills with their communities. So it’s a nice fit of the footage of me and Maisie setting off on one of our journeys.
The instrumentation on it is quite varied and I think there is even maybe a cheese grater being played somewhere in there. Then Harry sweeps into the chaos and pulls it all together with his fiddle.
The album’s vinyl release is accompanied by a book and film (that will be shown on KLOF Mag around the album’s release), documenting the research process behind the music. These were produced with support of Creative Scotland. They document Quinie’s research approach, and a development residency she completed which involved walking across Argyll with her horse Maisie, accompanied by filmmaker Lizzie MacKenzie. The resulting short film gives an insight into her process and how she explores the interdependent relationships between people, ancestors, animals, and place.
Quinie’s previous albums were released by Glasgow’s ubiquitous DIY label GLARC, emerging from the rich and radical traditions of the city’s experimental music scene. Forefowk, Mind Me continues to blur the boundaries between disciplines aesthetically and in method—one that embraces flattened hierarchies and agency.
“There are strong parallels between the DIY music scene and the folk tradition in Scotland,” says Quinie. “In both, we organize our own entertainment, we make music for each other, we explore what we find interesting. We learn from each other and build community, and we are not afraid to make a shonky-looking tape or CD. The difference is perhaps in intent and method—I take the ‘do what you like’ attitude of DIY and combine it with the ‘cherish what has come before’ values of the folk tradition. I see them as complementary rather than contradictory.”
Pre-Order Forefowk, Mind Me: https://upsettherhythm.bigcartel.com/product/quinie-forefowk-mind-me
London Album Launch: St Pancras Old Church on Friday, 30th May 7:30 PM (Tickets)
Website: https://www.quinie.co.uk/