A Thurso musician and filmmaker has just released his first solo album based on the soundtrack of his recently acclaimed eco film When Fish Begin to Crawl.
Jim Sutherland collaborated with BAFTA-winning filmmaker Morag McKinnon on the visionary film about the Flow Country which recently premiered at Eden Court in Inverness as part of the Glasgow Film Festival.
Jim, who is based in Edinburgh but still retains a fondness for Caithness, says: “At my ‘tender age’ and having been a musician all my life; I’ve just released my first ‘solo’ album.
“Solo is in inverted commas because it’s hardly a solo endeavour. There is after all a whole orchestra playing my music. But my music, it is.
“I wrote every note they play so in a way it is my first solo album, even though I never played on it. Apart from writing the score, my only performance role is to create some percussive effects with Caithness flagstone instruments and my modular synth. That and a sea of bells, tolling into the distance.”
The main focus of the immersive documentary When Fish Begin to Crawl is the Flow Country, the largest blanket peat bog in the world, and its inhabitants. RSPB footage of wildlife is intercut with the carnivorous plants and mosses of the peatlands and interspersed with memories of people who inhabit Caithness. The screen was split into a triptych, across which these various elements played alongside the soundtrack.
“As a composer for hire, although I’ve written and recorded a lot of music to order, I’ve never released anything under my own name,” adds Jim.
“It’s been a long project, having started when I was around eight-years-old. I have an enduring memory of lying on the edge of sleep in my childhood home, off the grey coast of Caithness, listening to the several foghorns of the Pentland firth.
“I would study them carefully trying to decipher a pattern as they called to one another. The foghorns differed in pitch, frequency and distance, phasing against each other with harmonic shifts shaped by the elements in the vast foggy seascape.”
He says the music creates “patterns in the apparently random chaos of nature” to evoke the changing qualities of light on the Caithness landscape, and the tidal currents of the Pentland Firth that flow between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea, or the sound of a curlew carried in the wind across the dhu lochans of the flow country.
“All this and more finds its way into my score. Then there was the tick-tock of the criticality alarm, at Dounreay nuclear power station, which is broadcast 24/7 over a tannoy to let the workers know that all is ok, only to fall to a horrifying silence if there is a problem.
“That silence is significant and although the sounds that carry across the great flat plains of Caithness have a particular quality, most important of all is the sense of space and the silence. I explore different ways of using sound to represent its absence.”
The album is called When Fish Begin To Crawl and is available on all streaming platforms.
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