With »Seven Weathers«, Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten take a durational approach to seven traditional songs, all of Scottish origin, that grow by the moment in uncommonly deep focus. Opening with the tragedy of »Lady Maisry«, at first all seems normal, in a traditional-music album sort of way. Fifteen minutes later, through slow-unfolding waves of music and seeming dimensions of time, the piece is done – and it’s as if the listener has enjoyed a full-body massage of the ear. After they repeat the process with six further intuitive peregrinations, each of its own cloth, the sense of the uncanny is complete.

Seven airs… seven weathers? The title is inspired by the Gaelic idiom »oidhche nan seachd sian« (»night of seven weathers«), these being the typically Scottish combination of: wind and rain, snow and frost, thunder and lightning, and hailstones. If it’s to reshape the landscape, they must be upon us already!

Musical and poetic freedom and pluralism are undeniable aspects of folk tradition: ballads and songs branching out in myriad variants, differing in mood, music, and text. On »Seven Weathers«, such freedom is eagerly explored. Whether gleaned from recorded or printed sources and in some cases carried by newly composed melodies originating in ideas by Fredrik, the songs are subsequently cultivated into fruition collaboratively, the duo ranging judiciously between preservation and invention. The first six are ancient Scottish ballads which find the duo looking inward – at both that nation and the human psyche – to find a typically human array of love, deception, and travail, with a fair measure of the supernatural too. The closer »Callieburn« is a song of emigration from Scotland to America, the duo looking outward to realms beyond, into an uncertain future.

The two musicians are perfectly matched throughout these epic wanderings. Alasdair Roberts: Scottish guitarist, songwriter, singer, restless collaborator. In some three decades of record making, his explorations of Scottish and other traditions have informed and inspired nine albums of original material, four albums of traditional songs, and a thousand and one live performances. Fredrik Rasten is a Norwegian guitarist/composer/improviser based in Oslo and Berlin, working with, as deftly noted by the Wire in 2025, »different manifestations of his engagement with just intonation.« Since 2016, he has done so prolifically, both solo and in many collaborative efforts, to increasing notice and acclaim. The two were introduced by Norwegian fiddler Hans Kjorstad, in a project uniting Ali and a group of Scandinavian avant-gardists under the collective name Alasdair Roberts og Völvur. Their album »The Old Fabled River« (2021) is a borderless exposition of traditional sounds from two lands on opposite shores of the North Sea, and what can be done with them today.

»Seven Weathers« sounds in the ear less like a record and more like a magic spell unfolding over a little over an hour and four sides of music. Central to the task is their patient expansion of the sound field, a bolstering of arrangements one assumes is informed by Fredrik’s focus on just intonation tuning as much as by a shared predilection for lengthy narrative ballads. The resulting travelogue of sound has polyphonic drones and phantasmic overtones galore, which infuse the telling of the songs here with a rough-hewn mythic cast sifting like time through the glass.

Possessed of all the humours, in an extraordinary state of ongoing growth, Alasdair Roberts and Fredrik Rasten’s »Seven Weathers« is a remarkable listening experience on every level that can be imagined, album of the year 2027 without a doubt.