Angeline Morrison needs no introduction to the learned readers of KLOF. But let me give you one anyway. Originally from the West Midlands, Angeline moved to Cornwall in her late teens in ardent pursuit of the Padstow obby oss. This fascination with the more ritualised and folkloric aspects of traditional culture has streaked through her work ever since – from the thrift store psychedelia of We Are Muffy and Rowan: Morrison to her seminal work, Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience, which is a vast and sonically adventurous excavation of the neglected contributions BPOC have made to UK folk culture over the centuries. She has garnered praise from the highest offices in the land, having performed at the BBC Proms and on Jools Holland, and is also the 2025 recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award for Composers.
Although never one to rest on her laurels, her new album is a collaboration with Scottish-Punjabi renaissance man Arun Sood and examines both artists’ shared Hebridean heritage. The impetus for the album came from Sood’s research into colour symbolism in ancient Celtic texts, which attributes synaesthetic characteristics to prevailing winds (westerly was thought of as brown/donn – and northerly as black/dubh). Donn Dubh is a vortex of cultural concepts and musical bricolage, allowing Sood and Morrison to ruminate on landscape, identity politics, mythopoetics and ventriloquise the voices of marginalised populations of Britain. But, as much as anything, Donn Dubh really rocks.
The opening track A Rìbhinn Og a Bheil Cuimhn’ Agad is a tender parting-song about a sailor whispering sweet nothings to his lassie before he roves the convulsing oceans. Angeline’s haunting vocals are initially supported by stark piano and minimal electronics, before the whole thing shatters into pulsing beats and echoing samples. This adventurous reimagining of traditional themes is one which supercharges the whole album.
Òran Molaidh is a repetitive hymnal with eddying currents of symphonic strings and rapturous brass, recalling Gavin Bryer’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, before the whole thing is broadsided by skittering electro beats and feedback loops. Teann A-nall Mo Chailin Donn (‘Come Here, My Brown-Haired Girl’) is a Gaelic love song with Morrison’s voice wedded to the gorgeous swells of a lonesome concertina, before being overwhelmed by layers of synth and droning vocals like the ghosts of 1000 lovers rising from the heathery moors. Ailein Duinn is a brooding instrumental with heavy slabs of bass shuddering against thickets of percussion like some kind of gnarly cyber-bagpipe. While final track, Bu Chaomh Leam Bhith Mireadh, rises from the speakers like a sonic cathedral of refracted voice, burbling synths and distortion until it gives way to spectral violin harmonics.
Donn Dubh is a challenging and exhilarating reimagining of Scots Gaelic traditions by two fearless musical cosmonauts at the top of their game. It reminds this jaded old hack of Eno/Byrne’s My Life in The Bush of Ghosts, with its collision of samples, distortion and elegiac piano channelling folk’s ancient past while forecasting its glittering future.
Donn Dubh (August 7th, 2026) Real World X