Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten
30th January 2027 at 7:00pm
The Scottish/Norwegian duo of Alasdair Roberts and Fredrik Rasten fuses their
respective work with traditional music, folk song and experimental minimalism. Their
first encounter was in the septet ‘Alasdair Roberts og Völvur’, which released the LP
«The Old Fabled River» on Drag City Records in 2021, featuring Roberts-originals
and a blend of Scottish and Norwegian traditional songs. In duo, Roberts and Rasten
have so far focussed on traditional Scottish narrative ballads, often with long
durations, and where slowly evolving musical materials build up throughout the
strophic verse-structure to emphasise the storytelling. The duo employs both field
recordings and printed sources of traditional song as the basis of their
interpretations, often evolving new original compositions and always resulting in a
meeting point between time-honoured and contemporary forms of musical
expression. Both musicians sing and play a variety of instruments, Roberts’ clear
and unadorned vocal delivery blending with Rasten’s sensibilities of just intonation
tuning and timbral qualities of sound.
