Tree Song 3

The Pianodrome, Edinburgh 16/09/26

Graeme Stephen (guitar, electronics), Aidan O’Rourke (violin, electronics), Stephen Henderson (drums, percussion).

There is an intrinsic beauty in witnessing three accomplished exponents of contemporary Scottish music operate within a space as distinct as The Pianodrome. Built entirely from upcycled pianos, the amphitheatre functions as a sympathetic resonator, a domed and layered wooden sound-box that catches every tonal inflection and reverberates with tactile history.

Eclectic fiddle player Aidan O’Rourke and adroit percussionist Stephen Henderson were appearing alongside this evening’s curator, the ever-inventive guitarist Graeme Stephen. Together they offered a collective, two-part exploration into how traditional musical roots can be honoured, dismantled, reassembled and reshaped into something modern and diverse, yet also deeply elemental and freshly coherent.

O’Rourke, known for his work with the experimental folk trio Lau, brings a phrasing style that sits at the intersection of Highland ornamentation and buzzing, multi-layered modernism. His bow work is always nuanced – at times breathy and ghost-like, slipping into polytonal sighs, and at other moments striking the strings with rhythmic incisiveness.

Beside him, Stephen provides an harmonic vocabulary that draws as much from melodic jazz, subtle dissonance, and ambient architecture as it does from folk structures. There are contemporary classical stylings and hints of Americana in the mix, too. It’s an intoxicating brew, highlighted and counterpointed by Stephen Henderson’s haunting, deliberative work on drums.

Their two trialogues, forty-minutes and half an hour respectively, were punctuated by a virtuosic, evolving twenty-minute suite of tunes from O’Rourke. Both sets segued different pieces of music together. That included reworkings of past material, but especially new work created by Graeme Stephen as part of his extended Tree Song project – a metaphor which evoking varied musical treats flourishing and falling as they will.

The project consists of new compositions with different collaborators every three months or so over a total of eighteen months. Tonight was the third concert in the current series. As always, it felt less like a rehearsed performance and more like a fluid, living conversation happening in real time, seamlessly blending received material and creative improvisation.

The axis was the debut of a newly composed piece by Stephen for solo violin and live electronics. Rather than feeling intrusive or synthetic within an acoustic space like The Pianodrome, the electronic processing acted as an extension of the instrument’s natural voice. Stephen used live looping, subtle delays, and granular pitch-shifting to build a polyphonic canvas over which O’Rourke could stretch out.

The fiddler employed processing, too. As with the guitar, the electronics did not obscure the wood and rosin of the violin. Instead, they stretched its overtones and textures across the room, creating an architectural field of sound that mirrored the layered timber of the surrounding venue, while Henderson added touches of percussive light, shade, and dynamics.

The duo and trio pieces showcased an unhurried telepathy developed through close collaboration. Stephen’s guitar work alternated between pointillistic fingerstyle and voice-led chord progressions that constantly recontextualized O’Rourke’s melodies. Rather than relying on straightforward tune sets (like the standard reel-or-jig structures of traditional folk) their compositions drift through shifting time signatures, sudden melodic turns, and expansive, improvisational spaces. There were moments where the music thinned to near silence, leaving only the whisper of a bow on gut and the gentle decay of a guitar string, before swelling into surges of kinetic energy.

What made all this distinct was its balance of technical thought and emotional weight. O’Rourke, Stephen and Henderson know how to engage the DNA of traditional Scottish and other music, treating it as open lineage rather than a fixed museum artefact. In the circular embrace of The Pianodrome, their performance unfolded as a focused study in electroacoustic exploration, structural intelligence, and shared understanding. Altogether, a special, evocative, boundary-crossing evening of music-making, ending with a suitably uplifting encore in the shape of a wonderful film tune, ‘The Kaylana.’

* More on Graeme Stephen’s Tree Song project here: https://www.graemestephen-treesong.com