'Strands' album intertwines Shetland traditions and contemporary influences

Prodigiously talented pianist Amy Laurenson was named BBC Radio Scotland’s young traditional musician of the year in January 2023 – a feat she has followed up by recording and releasing her highly anticipated debut album ‘Strands’.

Without doubt one of the most gifted musicians to come out of Shetland so far this century, Amy credits the coveted trad award with acting as a spur to develop her career further.

The year that followed has seen trips home for Shetland Folk Festival, to record ‘Strands’ live on stage at Mareel and for a pair of sold-out festive gigs with Kevin Henderson and Ross Couper.

Further afield she has appeared on stage at Cambridge Folk Festival, Edinburgh’s TradFest and the Trad Awards ceremony in Dundee, as well as a trio of performances at Celtic Connections in Glasgow.

It is easy to see why she felt compelled, on the back of the award success, to leave her bar job (at Glasgow’s Saint Luke’s) to focus exclusively on her multifaceted musical escapades.

“It’s obviously really amazing, it’s brought me so many good things – also a lot of imposter syndrome and anxiety that’s come along with that! – but I’m very grateful for it,” she says.
“It felt like there was a big part of the Shetland community chipping in for that, on social media as well – it was great seeing the community interacting with the news.”

Although she grew up in a community steeped in traditional music, the 24 year old did not take a direct route into the genre: Amy was surrounded by classical music as a child and began getting lessons from local teacher Diane Garrick aged seven.

In 2011 she was named junior young musician of the year for her exploits on the bassoon, before going on to win the main award for her piano playing in 2016. By then she was getting her first full introduction to traditional music through lessons from Shetland’s most renowned pianist Violet Tulloch.

But it was moving to Glasgow in 2017 to undertake a classical piano degree at the Royal Conservatoire Scotland (RCS) that inadvertently drew her more deeply into the traditional world. Inspired by the city’s thriving pub sessions and finding the experience of classical studies “isolating”, she decided to switch courses.

The eventual upshot is ‘Strands’, a unique-sounding, piano-based record that takes mostly Shetland fiddle tunes and imaginatively reworks and embroiders them with dextrous flourishes from her classical background. It encompasses everything from old traditional wedding tunes to contemporary jigs and reels.

Recorded live over a “pretty full on” couple of days in the Mareel auditorium last summer with her band - Amy’s partner Miguel Girão on guitar, double bassist Rhona MacDonald and Lea Søndergaard Larsen on bodhran – it goes without saying that the musicianship is of the highest calibre.

Perhaps most striking, though, is the unbound, infectious merriment that courses through her playing. While some of the arrangements are doubtless challenging to perform, the end product is 43 minutes of music that are simply an absolute joy to listen to.

Amy’s playing is equally affecting whether employing the elegiac grace heard on ‘Da Trowie Burn’ (which provided the soundtrack for a Promote Shetland film) and Tom Anderson’s ‘Lament for Lowrie I da Lea’ or the driving rhythms underpinning ‘Shetland Reels’ and ‘Da Boys o’ Da Lounge’.

Closing set ‘Four Filskettes’, beginning with a contemporary tune penned by first-class Shetland fiddler Jenna Reid, ensures the record bows out in the bouncy, feel-good fashion that is such a hallmark of the islands’ traditional music sound.

“The two threads through the album are this conversation between traditional and classical influences,” she says. “I use my left hand quite a lot to add more lines into the music, and there’s some points of improvisation on the album as well.”

Amy says she wanted to explore “the idea of tradition being a creative blueprint that serves as the as the ground in which wider aesthetics can merge into one unified vision”.

When she first started at RCS, Amy found her classical course “wasn’t for me – I found the course really isolated, very, very competitive with international students, in a practice room on your own…”

She was “lucky enough” to successfully audition for the traditional music course, which she found to be the “polar opposite”, and went on to earn a first class honours degree.

During her time in Glasgow she has taken much inspiration from a rich crop of young piano exponents in the city, including Michael Biggins and Rory Matheson (“total pioneers of what they’re doing”), along with the more seasoned talent of Dave Milligan. The latter credits Amy with having “beautiful ideas played with great control and flair”.

Amy speaks fondly of the abundant opportunities a Shetland upbringing afforded her, from the chance to learn from multiple top-class tutors to joining the Shetland Community Orchestra and performing at Shetland Folk Festival and Shetland Accordion & Fiddle Festival.

“It was such a huge thing to play at the festivals at the time,” she says, “and getting performance opportunities really pushed us to keep making music.”

Although it took some time to fully rewire her musical brain after switching RCS courses, Amy now feels she has settled upon a good equilibrium between the traditional and classical worlds.

“I found that when I went to put a traditional head on, the skillset is so different,” she explains. “Traditional music is something that’s so aurally focused, and because classical music is reading, I struggled to use my ear in the way that I needed to for traditional music.
“In this past year I have found a bit of a balance between traditional and classical, and found a way to fuse the two together.”

‘Strands’ made its way out into the world with an official launch in the grand architectural surrounds of the Mackintosh Church as part of the 2024 Celtic Connections in early February.

The project has received support from Youth Music and the Shetland Musical Heritage Trust. It was recorded by Mareel’s in-house studio engineer Tim Matthew, mixed by Scott Turnbull and mastered by Sam Proctor at Lismore Mastering.

The album’s dramatically striking artwork, meanwhile, features the distinctive seascape of Sandwick-based artist Ruth Brownlee, while the sleeve design is courtesy of Chloe Keppie.

In addition to her own projects, Amy continues to play in the bands Tern and LÉDA, while she also lectures in piano and traditional music at RCS Juniors, having first cut her own tutoring teeth while still in her teens at High Level Music in Lerwick.

‘Strands’ is available now on CD and digitally through Amy’s Bandcamp page.