Shore Leave - Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten live at Brown's of Leith

Shore Leave begins the new year with Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten live at Brown's on Tuesday 26 January. 

The Scottish folk musician Alasdair Roberts and Norwegian experimental musician Fredrik Rasten fuse their respective work with traditional music, folk song and microtonal minimalism. Their first encounter was in the septet Alasdair Roberts & Völvur, which released the LP The Old Fabled River on Drag City Records in 2021.The record combined Roberts’s compositions with versions of Scottish and Norwegian traditional songs.

On Seven Weathers, their new double album for Drag City Records, Roberts and Rasten focus on traditional Scottish narrative ballads, typically of long duration, where slowly evolving musical materials build up throughout the strophic verse-structure to emphasise the storytelling. They choose ballads with care, favouring time-transcending narrative themes that both bear witness to the day and age of their origin and are relevant to our times, be that politically, culturally or ethically. Both sing and play a variety of acoustic and electronic instruments, Roberts’s clear and unadorned vocal delivery blending with Rasten’s sensibilities of just intonation tuning and timbral qualities of sound.

The concert is part of a short tour marking the launch of their album Seven Weathers. Throughout 2024/5 they have enjoyed concerts in Glasgow, Berlin, Prague, Motvind Festival (Norway), Fanø Free Folk Festival (Denmark) ne:ar Festival (Slovakia) and Frequency Festival (Chicago, USA) as well as a short Norwegian tour in May 2026.

'Quietly escalating towards Scottish national treasure status' - Mojo

Tall ships once pitched up at the shore. Sailors dove into the dock. Seeking the shanties, seeking the sounds, seeking the joys of landfall. Sailors on shore leave, intent no repent. The ghosts of the sailors remain. They, and Shore Leave, welcome Alisdair and Fredrik to Brown's of Leith.

Tickets £18 / £12 concession (unemployed, charity workers, asylum seekers, students)

Brought to you in collaboration with Aidan O'Rourke and Tim Taylor.

#shoreleave #soundsatbrowns #brownsofleith