Can a song be site study, ritual, and sketchbook at once? Minor Gestures is an extended folk session staged in Glasgow – “in mystical locations around the Govan Stones, River Clyde, and underground streamlets.” Stylistically, the album oscillates between folk, drone, and improv. Musician Susannah Stark treats field recordings of birdsong and water as both backdrop and active collaborator.
Her voice – often more incantation than melody – rubs against modular synth samples, harmonium, trumpet, and accordion. She sings in Scottish Gaelic. Given the vanishingly small number of speakers, this feels less born of a living linguistic practice and more like an aesthetic decision (tellingly, Stark credits a language consultant in the liner notes). This gesture binds the album to the past – an absent, inaccessible past.
Here, folk isn’t the celebration of an identitarian heritage; it’s the mourning of something that perhaps never existed. Accordingly, Minor Gestures sits close to experimental music and art pop. At times Stark sounds as delicate as Julia Holter (»Caochan«), as solemn and sustained as Lankum (»Trì stiùirichean«), only to unsettle like Tanya Tagaq (»Ordinary Day«).
It’s a heterogeneous listening experience: songs surface, stagger, fade. Some remain sketches. Minor Gestures proves that even small gestures can make a landscape sing.
