Aberdeen

(First published in Issue 121 of Electronic Sound magazine, January 2025)

In this issue, Electronic Sound asked their writers to report on grass roots scenes and artists from around the UK. These were my contributions:

GRASS ROOTS: WHITBY

Along the winding alleyways of Whitby, traditionally the home of gothic gift shops and vintage knick-knacks, a new sound is beginning to drift. From a converted church hall on the town’s Flowergate thoroughfare comes the buzz of modular drones and synthesized loops, the hub of a burgeoning electronic music scene.

“We wanted to put on an event where we and our friends could play,” says David Owen, who – alongside partner Rebecca Denniff – has taken over the running of Flowergate Hall and launched a bi-monthly live gathering called Wavelength. “And we wanted to entice other music makers to play, to hang out and to start a local electro community. The ‘Electronic Us’!”

Whitby’s “Electronic Us” is infused with the town’s distinctive sense of the otherworldly. Ammonites are a trio whose manipulated field recordings provide a gentle waft of windswept strangeness. Goblin Market adds occult folkloric influences to ambient soundscapes. Donovan Silver crafts strident synth anthems, and local rumour suggests he may even be Gary Numan’s cousin. And a spectral figure called Blue-John Benjamin occasionally manifests to make haunted electro-pop in collaboration with Teesside producer Quidgybopper.

For three years Flowergate Hall played host to the annual Castles In Space weekender Levitation, but November 2024 saw David and Rebecca going it alone, inviting local artists to play alongside the likes of Scanner and Concretism at their own three-day Switched On festival. The duo are promising the event will become a yearly fixture.

In the meantime, their own musical projects are also flourishing. To a joint catalogue that already includes Band Of Cloud, The FLK and Subphotic, add new project Bonfire Hill: a synth-heavy exploration of local weirdness inspired – according to Rebecca – by “folklore, real and imagined, and the wilderness of the North York Moors”.

“It’s an evolving project,” she continues. “Love letters to the land itself, and the darkness”.

Tickets for Switched On 2026 are available here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/switched-on-2026-whitby-electronic-music-festival-tickets-1977496501268

GRASS ROOTS: ABERDEEN

“I came back to live in Scotland after many years away,” says Aberdeen artist Fiona Soe Paing. “I started remembering the folk tales I heard as a child, and it made sense to incorporate them into my music”. Fiona’s album Sand, Silt, Flint is a perfect melding of traditional music, psychogeography and electronica, an approach shared by many on this windswept stretch of the Scottish coastline – see also the evocative field recordings of Haworth Hodgkinson and the dark folktronica of Granite Skull.

Not surprisingly for a city that spawned The Shamen, there are pounding beats, too. Fire Brigade, Artillery Saints, 1516 and a welter of artists on the Source Material label all put their own slant on Aberdeen’s techno heritage. And when even the local university offers a course called ‘Beeps And Blips’, you know you’ve arrived in an electronic hotbed.

It’s run by Professor Suk-Jun Kim. “The course encourages the students to explore early pieces like Rainforest IV by David Tudor and Imaginary Landscapes by John Cage,” he explains. “And they learn to use analogue synths and sequencers to deliver live performance sets”. Jun is also director of Aberdeen’s SonADA collective, hosting an annual electronic music and sound arts festival since 2014.

You want more? Check out the eclectic output of the Ice Cream For Crow cassette label (in their own words, “DIY and weird”) and the equally varied ouevre released by Tryptamines. And if you’re ambling along Holburn Street, maybe also pop into the Chameleon shop, specialising in both rare vinyl and rather cool Danish furniture.

Why such a vibrant scene? Fiona Soe Paing has a theory. “Maybe because of the oil industry,” she smiles, “Maybe there’s a lot of young-ish single guys with money and time to spare when they come back home from working offshore?”

Sand, Silt, Flint is available here:
https://fionasoepaing.bandcamp.com/album/sand-silt-flint-3

CLOUDLAND BLUE QUARTET
Edinburgh
In 1977, David Reilly was inspired by Eno and Fripp’s No Pussyfooting to create looped recordings of his dad’s Bontempi organ.Since then, he has amassed an impressively eclectic catalogue of soundscapes, ambience, melodic art-pop and even the odd Stephen Sondheim cover. It’s a vast and beautiful world to explore.
https://cloudlandbluequartet.bandcamp.com/

MIKE DICKINSON
Middlesbrough
In a secret Teesside bunker sits mischievous imp Mike Dickinson, surrounded by a raft of vintage synths and battered guitars. Fuelled by a curious obsession with fantasy novelist Russell Hoban, he crafts proggy melodies with an anthemic feel, an approach epitomised by excellent new album Fremder.
https://mikedickinson.bandcamp.com

NEOCIA
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Jonathan Evans rose to prominence as co-frontman with Tyneside indie starlets Tusk, but since 2020 he’s been producing smooth trip-hop as Neocia, melding his own velvety vocals with slickly contemporary beats. The latest project? New album The House At Night, an exquisitely oddball collaboration with Durham rapper Faithful Johannes.
https://neocia.bandcamp.com

PINNEL
Newcastle-upon-Tyne
Using the childhood nickname her brother bestowed upon her, Lindsay Duncanson combines looped breaths, tongue clicks and other ASMR-friendly found sounds with spoken word explorations of landscape and social history. For tinglingly good examples, check out 2023’s Blue Topography Radio as well as her work with experimental ensemble Noizechoir.
https://pinnel.bandcamp.com

RURAL DISTRICT LO FI RECORDING PROJECT
Mid-Sussex
A purring cat, a ticking clock, a creaking door and a crying baby… then it all goes a bit Hammer Horror. On new album Ghostbusting With Harry Price, field recorder extraordinaire David Soulscorch summons the spectres of Borley Rectory, expertly combining spooky sound collage with radiophonic swoops and swooshes.
https://ruraldistrictlofirecordingproject.bandcamp.com

SCHOLARS OF THE PEAK
Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire
The bells, the bells! Drew Huddart is a genuine campanologist, turning the bell-ringing patterns of his favourite local churches into gently pastoral synth workouts. Three impressive 2024 EPs have paved the way for debut album Polymorphic, an affecting homage to the landscapes and benign ghosts of the Peak District.
https://thescholarsofthepeak.bandcamp.com

SICK ROBOT
Sunderland
For over a decade, Liam White has been carving out his own distinctive North-eastern niche, somehow lacing banging beats with a pale, haunted sensibility. 2022 album A Field In Yorkshire is a masterclass of woozy techno, 2024’s Televised Weather Controlled Blackout brings further darkness to shadowy Wearside dancefloors.
https://sickrobot1980.bandcamp.com

TORPA
Chester
Steve and Peter Dandy might live in Chester, but their hearts are clearly in Hollywood. Since 2012, the brothers have been creating cinematic synth soundtracks for epic films that exist only in their imaginations, with 2020 album Neon Plague the finest example of their Vangelis-meets-John Carpenter signature sound.
https://torpa.bandcamp.com