Rub Off The Dark presents Alasdair Roberts (Drag City) / Fredrik Rasten – Duo 23.07.2025
Support by Joey Gavin
The Scottish/Norwegian duo of Alasdair Roberts (Drag City) 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.
Roberts and Rasten 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 it politically, culturally or ethically. 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.
Joey Gavin is an Irish songwriter and guitarist based in Berlin.
Photo credit: Luke Fowler
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