Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten

The Scottish/Norwegian duo of Alasdair Roberts and Fredrik Rasten fuses their respective work with traditional music, folk song and experimental minimalism. Their first encounter was in the septet ‘Alasdair Roberts og Völvur’, which released the LP «The Old Fabled River» on Drag City Records in 2021, featuring Roberts-originals and a blend of Scottish and Norwegian traditional songs. In duo, Roberts and Rasten have so far focussed on traditional Scottish narrative ballads, often with long durations, and where slowly evolving musical materials build up throughout the strophic verse-structure to emphasise the storytelling. The duo employs both field recordings and printed sources of traditional song as the basis of their interpretations, often evolving new original compositions and always resulting in a meeting point between time-honoured and contemporary forms of musical expression. Both musicians sing and play a variety of instruments, Roberts’ clear and unadorned vocal delivery blending with Rasten’s sensibilities of just intonation tuning and timbral qualities of sound.