Andrew Wasylyk on his new album and getting stuck on Mull with Liz Lochhead

TEDDY JAMIESON

IMAGINE it is late afternoon. Imagine it is late afternoon in Dundee. The violet hour. Maybe you are walking through Balgay Park. Maybe it’s today. Maybe it’s some half-remembered day from childhood. Maybe the sun is shining, and shadows are lengthening. The air is still, sound muted and at a distance. There is no one around. Only you, alone, as the day slips away.

How will you remember this moment? How does it make you feel? Is there a sense of grace to it? A tremor of anxiety? Maybe both?

Or maybe the question to ask here is what does that afternoon sound like? Perhaps a little like the fourth track on Andrew Wasylyk’s new album, entitled, yes, The Violet Hour. A tremulous, rolling piano line, an urgent, restless ticking undertow – provided by finger-picked acoustic guitar and pizzicato strings – that sounds like time running on (or is it time running out?), and above it all a saw (played by Avril Smart) that sings skywards.

What is this? Hope and memory and anxiety all turned into the consolation of music. Andrew Wasylyk, the alias of Scottish writer and producer Andrew Mitchell, one-time Hazey Jane front man, sometime member of Idlewild, Scottish Album of the Year (SAY) award nominee, has returned with a new album, Fugitive Light and Themes of Consolation, a wordless musical journey through landscapes past and present. The follow-up to his SAY-endorsed album The Paralian, it doesn’t need lyrics to conjure up its freight of loss and desire and joy. Fugitive Light … is the sound of all those half-remembered late afternoons in our past and the sighing distance between then and now.

“I think there’s a lot of metaphorical and emotional landscapes being unearthed in there,” Wasylyk admits as he sits at home on one particular August afternoon. “There’s a lot of anxieties and accepting love and loss and the idea of metaphorical lightness and dark gathering together and the curious grace that produces.”

This morning Wasylyk has been out helping a neighbour take a cupboard down a tenement flight of stairs. (“Ropes and all sorts. It’s the most physical exertion since February.”) After we speak, he will leave to go to his studio as he does most days.

But right now he is talking to me about the landscapes of childhood, Liz Lochhead, his dream of one day writing a score for a film (if his favourite director Peter Strickland is reading this Andrew would be happy to take a call) and, mostly, about turning memory into music.

“I grew up right across Dundee and I spent a lot of time in Invergowrie,” he recalls. “I spent a lot of summers down the road in Kingoodie quarry swimming. And I think that all fed into it a lot. Walking through Balgay Park watching skeins of geese disappearing for the winter, wandering what on earth I’m doing with my life.”

What he has done with it is make music, in pop groups and now as a composer and multi-instrumentalist. He played nearly everything on the new album himself, with the exception of Avril Smart’s saw, string arrangements by his friend Pete Harvey, and field recordings of school kids and the oyster catchers outside his studio window. “They’re so noisy. I had to keep stopping recording, so I thought, ‘Well, I’ll just have to embrace this.’

“It’s not really some grand or vulgar display of virtuosity,” he demurs, talking about his hands-on approach. “It’s really just time and economy. I think we’ll only see more of that, unfortunately, in light of events.” He doesn’t say the word coronavirus but …

“There’s nothing like working with a larger ensemble and having that interaction ,” he continues, “having that synergy in a room together. But it’s not always practical. So, I often find myself working on my own and building these things from scratch. It could start with anything from a piano motif to a drum machine groove.

“I have a little space where I have various instrumentations set up so I can noodle away and see what kind of door opens up.”

In some senses, he says, the new album was a reaction to the slightly disorienting success of The Paralian, particularly in the wake of its SAY nomination.

“I have never had any acknowledgement for my work like that before. It was deeply humbling. I

BMG

ALEX GREEN

ANGELHEADED HIPSTER

THE SONGS OF MARC BOLAN AND T REX

Marc Bolan was friend and rival to David Bowie, first to find fame and first to No1 after he moved from 1960s mystical folk rock duo Tyrannosaurus Rex to the glam rock monster T Rex.

But he’d been left far behind by the time of his death in a car crash in 1977, and will only be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in November, 24 years after Bowie. AngelHeaded Hipster aims to redress the balance and also serves as a celebration of producer Hal Willner, who died of Covid-19 in April.

Bolan released a huge number of songs in his short life, and some of the best-known are missing from the 26 here, including Hot Love, Telegram Sam and 20th Century Boy. Kesha kicks off with Children Of The Revolution, before Nick Cave produces the album highlight with a fantastic version of Cosmic Dancer.

Lucinda Williams slows Life’s A Gas right down, Peaches records an electronica Solid Gold, Easy Action in Berlin and Nena supplies a Motown take on Metal Guru. Not all the tracks hit those heights, but AngelHeaded Hipster will make you want to listen on repeat.

September is normally when Take One Action, a film festival promoting social change, sets up camp in Scotland’s arthouse cinemas, with events taking place at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse and Glasgow’s GFT cinemas as well as at partner venues such as the CCA, also in Glasgow.

But although cinemas are re-opening and audiences are returning this month, for its 13th iteration Take One Action is this year delivering its festival online.

The festival begins on September 16 and runs until September 27 and each of the 30 or so films will be available to view online. Also in the programme are live Q&A sessions as well as a series of workshops and conversations around many of the issues raised.

With three-quarters of the features directed by women (and even more of the shorts) and with nearly a third of the overall programme offering directed by women of colour, the festival offers a timely crucible for investigation into and discussion of many of the questions and issues concerning the world in 2020, whether it’s the environment, marginalised communities, LGBTQ+ rights or – the reason America’s cities are burning – institutional racism.

Among the highlights are the British premieres of Shalini Kantayya’s Coded Bias and Elegance Bratton’s Pier Kids. The first examines the use of AI in facial recognition software, highlighting how racism is built into the very the algorithms it runs on. The second looks at an area of downtown New York which has become a sanctuary of sorts for gay men and women of colour.

BARRY DIDCOCK