Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten are today announcing their new album, Seven Weathers, a new collection of traditional folk songs of Scottish origin, due for release on January 29th, 2027, via Drag City. While Alasdair should need no introduction to regular readers, he has been making music for some three decades now and is one of most written about artists in KLOF’s pages, some of you will recall that the Oslo/Berlin-based improviser and guitarist Fredrik Rasten is also a member of the experimental folk collective Völvur, who collaborated with Roberts in 2021 on The Old Fabled River, an album described by Thomas Blake as being “full of subtle mirrors, the dualism and continuity of life, pairs and opposites…but it is also humane and wild and as vividly detailed as we’ve come to expect from anything Alasdair Roberts is involved in.” More recently, we reviewed Strange the Grass Grows, Rasten’s collaboration with avant-garde folk musician Seamus Cater.
Their treatment of traditional music is well matched, employing, as Drag City suggest, equal amounts of preservation and invention. As mentioned previously, “even at his most traditional, it’s rare to find Alasdair retreading old ground. The Scottish singer and guitarist is not averse to recording an old favourite or two, but there is always a sense of exploration and a breath of newness running through everything he does.” That sense of exploration extends to this collaboration as well.
They lead the way with the folk ballad Lady Maisry (Child 65), which features a melody written by Rasten. Their voices are well-suited, as they showed previously on The Old Fabled River when they covered Robert Burns’ Song Composed In August, which we described as one of the album’s most quietly impressive moments. The experimentation on Lady Maisry is subtle, drifting gently in like the flurries of snow in Rasten’s accompanying video. The overall effect is both mesmerising, beautiful and haunting.
Variants of this ballad also exist under the name Bonnie Susie Cleland, which Alasdair sang on ‘Revenge of the Folksingers‘ (2011), as part of the “Concerto Caledonia” (which included David McGuiness, Olivia Chaney and more).
Seven Weathers will be released on LP, CD, & digital formats on January 29th.
Pre-Order/Save: https://lnk.to/sevenweathers
The duo will also be touring through the UK and Ireland following the album’s release – ticket info for those shows can be found here.
Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten UK + Ireland Tour Dates 2027
Jan. 26th @ Brown’s of Leith – Edinburgh, UK
Jan. 27th @ The Hug and Pint – Glasgow, UK
Jan. 28th @ Bishop’s House – Sheffield, UK
Jan. 29th @ The Handle Bar – Oxford, UK
Jan. 30th @ Bluestone Brewing Company – Newport, UK
Jan. 31st @ Prince Albert – Stroud, UK
Feb. 16th @ Cafe OTO – London, UK
Feb. 17th @ Cafe OTO – London, UK
Feb. 18th @ Y Fic – Bethesda, UK
Feb. 19th @ The Cobblestone – Dublin, IE
Feb. 20th @ Yeats Building – Sligo, IE
Feb. 21st @ Wexford Arts Centre – Wexford, IE