Arctic voyages searching for whales, and for lost ships – these form the starting-point for a collaboration between two musicians and a poet, in a blend of sound reaching from traditional Shetland fiddle music to creative improvisation with instruments, electronics and voice. The music is developed from the complex songs of the great whales, and the stories of the men who hunted them in the hostile Greenland seas – and the story of Captain Francis McClintock’s voyage in the yacht Fox to try to find news of the Franklin expedition.

Viola player Katherine Wren is a member of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and founder of Nordic Viola, a flexible ensemble promoting contemporary and traditional music from the North Atlantic. Clarinettist and improviser Alex South has also carried out research into the relationship between whale vocalizations and human musics. Poet Lesley Harrison grew up in Dundee and has always been fascinated by the 19th-century whaling industry and its aftermath, and has visited Iceland, Greenland and Svalbard, exploring its reach.

The film CETACEA will also be shown, with live music and words. It brings together the trio’s music and words with marine biologist Michael Scheer’s audio recordings and Alexander and Nicole Gratovsky’s beautiful underwater footage of the gracefully coordinated movements of pilot whales.

Listen to CETACEA by Alex South and Katherine Wren by Katherine Wren on #SoundCloud

With funding support from the Hinrichsen Foundation and from the Cockaigne Fund, administered by Foundation Scotland, and from NorthLink.