A/am/ams - Ainslie Roddick, Josie Vallely and Rufus Isabel Elliot in conversation

An abstract image of the shore taken from the A/​am/​ams publication

Duilich, chan eil seo ri fhaighinn ach sa Bheurla an-dràsta.

Ainslie Roddick [AR]

To begin with, it would be really nice to hear where you are with your practice just now, and what have you been learning this year?

Josie Vallely [JV]

I have fallen into this practice, in a way that with my visual arts practice it was all a bit more considered and planned whereas this is kind of unfolding a bit more as I learn and as I develop my ideas. But I think, essentially, I’m trying to articulate myself, or I’m trying to give a voice to myself and connect with people through that. The way that I do that is by voicing other people, characters or narratives – through the songs. So originally I came to looking at it through a gender lens and feeling like my voice sits somewhere in between. I wasn’t quite sure where my voice fit, and I like to sing but I didn’t find a place for my voice in singing, until I heard Sheila Stewart singing and discovered the Scottish traveller and Nacken’ tradition of song and I was like: oh! this is where my voice is […] very strong. It was just a way of singing that let go of some of the aesthetics that you see in other types of singing that I really liked, and I found it really emotive. So I started to explore that and initially I was interested in looking at the content of the songs in terms of the stories they told. I was particularly interested in telling women’s stories or stories that resonated with me or were a bit different from the big ballad tradition that is normally associated with traditional Scots songs, specifically. So I started there and then as I continued on that journey, and started to zoom in a bit more on the songs I really liked and had more of a feel for what I was doing. Then I started to get more playful with the forms of the songs, and what was going on within them, aside from just the words of the narrative. So I started to apply the same curiosity to the way that they were structured, or the sounds that were in them and the way they were sung. So, yes, that was over a few years.

More recently, I’ve been looking specifically at piping sounds and how to bring them into my singing, which has then led me to totally deconstruct into syllables and sounds. That quite naturally led to this project which brings in all of those elements; voicing a character or a narrative, but also playing with sounds, and the themes that are in place of identity and gender – all of those things coming together, in a way. I guess the thing it doesn’t have, which usually is really clear in my practice, is this link to a more traditional way of singing, but I think, now that I know more about how I approach tradition: I understand that the only tradition worth saving is the tradition of building, exploring, and being curious about songs and singing them. That’s what I’m wedded to rather than keeping things like archives, and keeping things static. So, I don’t know if that made sense, but that is my answer.

AR

Which resources and archives do you draw inspiration from?

JV

I worked with The School of Scottish Studies archives a little bit. There’s a woman called Lizzie Higgins who’s a Scottish traveller from the North East, and I could spend all my time just listening to her, and learning from her because her repertoire is so interesting. She brings in her mum, Jeanie Robertson, who was a famous ballad singer, and her dad is also a famous piper, so she incorporates those two elements into her singing. So I learned a lot from her. But then I also was listening to a lot of pipe music, and spending time with people who know about pipe music and they taught me things. I had this snippet of vocalised pipe music […] that I was listening to from the archives, which I was trying to decode by writing down what I could hear and then re-sing it. I think the piper’s name is Josh Dickinson and he teaches piping at the conservatoire. It turns out that he’s written his PhD on this one tiny snippet of vocalised pipe music, so we were able to deep dive into that, which was really cool.

AR

The project started with a classical tradition (and conversations with people like Lea Shaw), you’ve been trying to think and steer through the language of music making from a different tradition. You mentioned last week, Josie, how the meeting of those two worlds has been super interesting but also challenging. Can you talk a bit about the challenge of that, what it was like to begin with, and how you navigated that to find your shared language?

JV

So I thought at first that sounded really exciting. Maybe I was either naive or incredibly optimistic – let’s go with optimistic – about the transitioning between those two worlds. I am confident that I can learn complex melodies and I do have experience of getting my head around tricky things, in terms of the way I sing. But the challenge that I hadn’t quite gotten my head round was usually being the composer of my music, though I’d never really thought of myself in that way. Now that Rufus is the composer of the music I realise I usually do make those decisions about if something’s working, or where it should be or for how long something should be. I just didn’t have one language to explain that as part of my process. Also, I usually sing unaccompanied, or if I am accompanied: I’ll just say to someone I’m working with […] to do their thing and I do mine and we go alongside each other. I think when me and Rufus first started going through it together we both realised this is a different process. It’s quite vulnerable to learn a song in front of someone because for so long you sound so incompetent. It’s only now, months and months on, that I’m actually able to voice it in my own voice – up until then it was just processing.

AR

What’s the point at which you realise that it’s your voice?

JV

It comes out different. In the last practice, with Harry (Gorski-Brown), it was like something just shifted. I stopped having to think about how the note should sound, and I know what it is, in my body. Then I can just let it flow out of me and I’m confident with it, so it can take its own form rather than… I can’t really explain it, but imagine if you’re making a pot. I don’t know if you make pots! but when you’re throwing a pot and nervous and you’re not quite sure what it is you’re doing, you overthrow it, and before you know it you’ve squished it and it’s gone. Whereas once you get the hang of it, it’s there, it takes two seconds and it’s so easy. It’s kind of similar with the voice: if you’re thinking about the note, then the note is not living in you so you can’t let it flow. Does that make sense?

AR

That connects with you, Rufus, as I know you’ve also been doing the workshop with the School of Plural Futures, on finding your voice. The search for a meaningful voice or genuine voice through looking at history and being in (a) place – being in Elgol and trying to reconnect with ancestors.

Rufus Isabel Elliot

Yeah, that moment where myself and Josie were in Dunvegan going through the music and both feeling pretty mortified. It’s uncomfortable for you, that I’m witnessing you trying to find a way through this music, and it’s also uncomfortable for me (having found a way through this music myself) to watch you find a different way through it. It’s very vulnerable.

I was kind of away from music for a year and a half. When I came back to it, there were a lot of questions. And a lot of them have come from a discomfort with my own voice, and the way that some of my experiences are written there, or how I feel about that. And I guess, a bit of a breakthrough in my work was seeing how I was taking words that meant quite a lot to me, that were quite personal, but also quite secretive, and trying to set them to music, but not to be sung – to be played. That was a way of making it possible for me to speak: by making melodies related to the way I often speak, with quite a limited range. I didn’t realise that I was doing it at first and then after a while, you’ve done it, and you look at it and can see what’s going on. You could make the choice to try and run away from that or you can choose to say, okay, if that’s what you’re doing – how can you do more of it? How can you do it differently, and what else lives in this? A lot of my music is very vocal, but it doesn’t tend to involve a singer, so that’s quite interesting. I mean for me, the oddest thing about this is maybe sometime in the last six months the piece… or the project sort of detached from my life and is this thing that exists… going along over here and my life is going along over there. (This is just in my mind because I got my stitches out yesterday but) It’s like taking the stitches out. You pull one out, it’s gone a little bit further, and now there’s this world that’s completely detached from me, and actually nothing to do with me. But it’s quite hard to lay down the idea that you’re still holding it.

AR

There’s a point I think when you make an artwork that you’re like, oh God, I don’t have control over this anymore – it’s done or it’s nearly done and I feel good about it and I’ve learned this. But now it will go out into the world, and it will do something that is also great, but that you don’t quite create the headspace for (when you’re making it). You think it’s the end but it’s not, it’s the start.

JV

If someone came up to me and said I’m gonna sing your music’, I’d be like, oh hell no! To let go of it, let other people voice it, […] I don’t think I would be brave enough to do it. But I guess what’s good and could work with it is, because I see my voice; my ability to sing and the way that I sing as separate to me. It’s almost like an instrument inside me that, given the right conditions, will play. There’s an overlap with this idea of the konya’ (sp?), which is a traveller terminology for your ancestral spirit moving through you via song or story. Again, it’s about a number of factors coming together: it’s about you being really comfortable with the material and being emotionally connected; your audience being in the right headspace and connecting with you – and everything coming together to settle in. In this way, that’s where I want to go with this piece – to the point where I’m not looking at the score and asking what Rufus wants me to do here, but getting to the point where I know it. It’s just funny to think of […] how we’re all connected by these melodies whirring around our heads.

AR

It’s really interesting what you said about it feeling like it’s not a singular voice. I think, in your music, you seem to create through collage and deep investigation, with poetry and traditional song and different ways of singing and holding stories. It can’t be a singular thing. You’re creating a collective voice. When Rufus got in touch originally we had been looking at ideas of plurality; plural futures or plural voices, and this was a starting point for the conversation. I think the most interesting, hopeful, part is where we’re not putting pressure on ourselves as individuals all the time but holding space as a collective.

My last question is about place. There has been a big endeavour in this work to think about all the different ways of knowing and being in a place, as well as being in between and across places. We spoke about this briefly the other day, how expanding and unfixing some of these ideas, and a sense of place, is really important to you and in your work. Can you talk a bit more about this?

JV

Yeah, initially I didn’t really give it a place, I didn’t have a language for it and then when I started singing, and I didn’t know where to sing, I started to go to traditional singing settings and met with people whose voices I liked, and asked them what they thought of my singing. People said: your singing has a real sense of place’, and I didn’t know what that meant. I think this idea that people hear it (the voice) and imagine where it lives; that voice, that way of singing or speaking and the Scots language, got me thinking about it in my work. I started to be playful with it and incorporate other things associated with place, and Scottishness, and a chanter and bringing them all in, playfully.

The songs do connect with landscape, often when I’m singing I’ll be imagining places and imaginary worlds where each of the songs live. For example, there’s one where I sing about a lark, which I’ve put words to from a poem about a woman aging. In my head, I know exactly what that house is like, as if I’ve been in that cottage and I know its textures – but I never see the characters, it’s always just the places. Then it was really easy for me to understand where Rufus was coming from when it was saying it’s an eternal beach that lasts forever (a/​amams)…

JV

It was really easy for me to step into a world where places have voices, and anything can happen, because that’s where I already am in my songs. I think that’s really important for me, in terms of trying to articulate myself; who am I, where do I belong, where do I live, what place am I? I was talking to these indigineous Australian artists recently whose ancestors go back thousands of years with the sense of the land being who they are. Whereas for me, I’m an Irish Catholic, or am I an English immigrant to Edinburgh, or an Edinburgh immigrant to Glasgow, or am I a West-end immigrant to Pollokshields!? Where do I belong? I’m in my garden maybe – that’s definitely mine. Maybe all of the above, or none of the above. Playing with all of those feelings – one minute I’m this, one minute I’m that, and also the songs allowing other people to decide what you are – I’m up for that. Once I went to this event, and someone sang a song I knew, I asked them where they had learned it, and he said a girl taught him who had learned from a traditional singer in Scotland herself. Again, I asked who specifically taught him, and once he told me I realised I had taught her that song, which I had learned from youtube. This idea that the oral tradition can be restarted. Because of the context they heard me sing it in, they made assumptions that connected them to it in a certain way, and passed it on with those assumptions attached to it. That’s funny.

I think that it’s about the idea of what Scotland is; rooted in heritage or past… so it doesn’t give space for the experience of putting your bins out, you know? Even if you’re putting your bins out in Gairloch. I’ve always tried to incorporate that, and had fun incorporating that into my brand, or whatever it is when you’re a musician sharing your practice. I like that jarring juxtaposition or rejection of (the idea of) the folk musician with the clarsach on the beach in the wind. I like that, but instead it’s me wearing my wellies and eating a solero. The coming together of it all and the mismatch is exciting!