Accordion Crimes
Our new weekly feature offers up some of the best new music from Scotland. To kick us off we have the extraordinary debut album by Leith-based Callum Easter who’s with the Pictish Trails anarchic micro-label Lost Map Records (dedicated to “reassess how we discover and explore music amid the disorientating digital geography of the 21st century.”)
Here Or Nowhere was released as a vinyl LP and online earlier this year and feeds off previous work such as mini album Get Don’t Want (2016).
Easter’s music is like a love-child born between Bob Dylan and Martyn Bennett, with Sleaford Mods acting as midwife in a birthing pool filled by an unsettled Phil Cunningham. Extraordinary raw emotional live performances combine accordion and guitar “distended and recontexualised via a variety of effects boxes, samplers and sequencers” in lo-fi glory.
Lost Maps calls the album: ‘a sparse, stark, deeply personal and by turns hopeful, menacing and despairing clutch of intuitively retro-futuristic songs united, as he explains, by “a feeling that the world is fucked up and a belief that people can fix it together.”
Listen on Bandcamp here.
Follow him on Twitter here.
But the album here.
See him live at Lost Map’s Strange Invitation Bellfield, Portobello, Edinburgh Sat 12th Oct 1pm til 11.30pm with Pictish Trail, Maranta, Callum Easter, Vanishing Twin, Jane Weaver presents FENELLA, Fell, Molly Linen & Faith Eliott.
Get tickets here.
We are supported only by our readers. We don't have corporate backers and we don't take advertising, so we rely entirely on your support.
Help to support independent Scottish journalism