Path to success

Pictish Trail - Island Family

Despite living on an island for the past decade, Eigg dweller Johnny Lynch, aka Pictish Trail, confesses he is “not that much of an outdoors person,” being more partial to the inside of a music venue.

During the pandemic, however, Lynch came to love his island environment, tucked away in his bothy studio with the waves crashing outside. It’s from here that as head of the Lost Map ‘family’ that he also runs his own micro-indie record label – although his own latest release stretches far and wide via its relationship with the London-based

Moshi Moshi imprint.

The thrusting electro indie sounds of Lynch’s tenth (give or take) full-length recording beam directly from that environment, with the opening title track referencing Eigg’s Massacre Cave, where most of the island population was wiped out in a 16th century clan feud.

Back in the 21st cent ury, Lynch nurses his hangover after anothisland er party on the mournful comedown of ‘In The Land of the Dead’, then gets back out on to the beach on the expansive, elemental ‘Melody Something’.

He indulges his sense of lo-fi play throughout with the fuzz arpeggios of ‘Nuclear Sunflower Swamp’ and the bleeps and burps of analogue synthesizers embellishing the Krautrock propulsion of ‘Natural Successor’. Lynch sounds like a slightly unsettled Beck on the lowslung ‘It Came Back’, delivers a pseudoisland rap on the shuffling ‘Remote Control’, which occasionally veers off into the hurly burly, and rides the synth surf on the gonzo garage rock of ‘Green Mountain’.

Despite his love of the island life, on this evidence Pictish Trail could really be going places