Hairst
Alison Scott highlights some of the passing season’s festivities: Maximum Tilt, Ecologies of Listening, Lughnasadh & Interesting Things
Photo: Alison Scott
If summer is discussed as a festival season in Scotland, you might think firstly of the hoards in Edinburgh, its many festivals, and particularly the Fringe. While leaving that behemoth and its discourse to others (see pieces by Rosie and Rosie), the festivals I’m offering glimpses of here nonetheless have a relationship to fringes, if not The fringe, all operating outwith Scotland’s major cities and in certain niches around artists moving image, music and sound practices. Whether framed as festivals or not, all in various ways offer that kind of buzzy limited-time-only experience for a rather particular audience, pulled together for a small—exceptional—amount of time.
Reflecting on this group of festival-ish events as a whole is maybe slightly weird given their range of audiences and forms, but one other simple impetus was to write up some events that we were not able to cover otherwise with PAM. There are others that we missed entirely and would have liked to hold writing about. I didn’t go to these events intending to write, I went with friends, my partner, or by myself; paid (or volunteered) my way. Summer is over and out, and post-this I’ll get back to lurking in the PAM edits.
MAXIMUM TILT, LUX SCOTLAND, ST ANDREWS
23-25 June 2026
Peter Hall, ‘Akenfield’ (1974). Courtesy of BFI.
I got there by a couple of shoogly buses along the coast, through the intense strawberry farming of Angus and Fife in a dusty heatwave. We attempted to cool off in the sea, in breaks between films, before the relief of the haar returned.
The format of the festival, taking place over three days (of which I attended two) in St Andrews in the summer, lent itself to thinking about the changing/ed prospects of semi-rural life. St Andrews is an outlier in Fife, an incredibly wealthy pocket where at this time of year students have flown home, with golfers and daytrippers taking their place. This particular milieu is disrupted with the arrival of a niche crowd of studious artists moving image fans. Organised in partnership with the Film Studies department at University of St Andrews, the festival took over the Byre Theatre and was programmed by Andrew Black and Anne-Marie Copestake.
With minimal introductions, after screening discussion circles were ‘timed, not facilitated’ by LUX Scotland staff, allowing the group to feel its own way through common themes of belonging, land, industrialisation, alienation, capitalism and activism.
This wasn’t the type of film festival for scribbled circles on handouts, decisions of which of the concurrent screenings to go to and what to skip: we all watch the same thing. The film that stuck with me is not one I was that excited to see or heard about in advance: not a new release or something doing the rounds. It was made in 1974 by Peter Hall, a sort of adaptation of an ethnographic study of the villages of Suffolk that informed the 1969 book by Ronald Blythe of the same name: ‘Akenfield’. The titular village is a fictive amalgam of these very real places and people, and features people acting/ appearing in film for the first—and presumably only?—time, including the lead actor: a local farmer who plays three generations of men in the same family. I was blown away; it felt like watching Barry Lyndon for the first time, like something you should have seen already.
After the fact I learnt it was only recently restored, but also that it was shot on weekends only, across nine months. We watch village and farming life evolve across these generations playing out their lack of choice—their labour and livelihoods beholdent to landowners, and the state in times of war. Moments of escape—from school, from the trudge of the expected trajectory, the day-to-day subservience—are short lived and mythologised, as the timelines fold in on one another claustrophically. There’s a memorable scene harking back to the earliest generation of men depicted in the film, when the harvest is brought in from the fields, hay stacks piled high on wagons with a young child labourer crowning the top. In procession they pass a grand house, the well dressed gentry stand watching as though taking a breath of air mid-dinner-party, gradually retreating into the house as the harvester's shouts grow louder and closer. The central character shouts with the others in celebratory abandon, rather than the alienation writ on his face, through the generations, in the majority of the film. Even in this moment of rejoicement, this onlooking upper crust is who the ultimate benefit still goes to: the reason the rare seasonal rabble is tolerated. Afterwards I find myself down a rabbit hole, unpicking the specifically East Anglian customs of the harvest to learn that the word they were shouting was ‘largesse’: a kind of call for tips, asking for acknowledgement for the workers’ hard labour and donations of funds for the harvest feast. Read in the context of the festival programme, alongside films like ‘Challenge to Fascism: Glasgow's May Day’ (1938) by Helen Biggar and Sheffield Film Co-Op’s ‘Bringing it all back home’ (1987), we’re encouraged to make connections between worker and protest traditions across time and place and resist pastoral versus urbanist fantasies.
I loved Red Star’s ‘The War Zone (video 2)’ (1982), a film made by cycling between sites characterised by military operations. It prompted my mind to wander out of the theatre and into the landscapes around this part of the east coast, to the anti-tank defences at Tentsmuir, nearby Leuchars base and places like Barry Buddon that take on the dual-use as nature-reserve-cum-military-exclusion-zones.
The filmmaker-programmers joined the discussion groups, and did not have an introductory moment on stage—thus they melted into the audience. I felt myself wanting to hear more from them, slightly annoyed despite myself at this impulse (is it modesty? is it withholding? what’s the expectations of hosting, or performing?). This led to some questioning of my own desire to hear why these films particularly had meant enough to the programmers to share them with all of us. It made the festival relaxed, on the whole. In one discussion group I was in, there was an entertaining/ embarrassing moment for some fellow audience members who offered lightly critical and questioning comments on a work, prompting the ‘reveal’ of the filmmaker who made it. Sometimes it’s kinder to everyone to be up front with your position from the off, perhaps. Non-hierarchy isn’t just pretending there’s no hierarchy, right? The interrogation of the festival format is something that LUX Scotland clearly are deeply committed to, alongside embedding critical writing within their programme. I wrote on last year’s dispersed version, and you can read a more in depth article on Maximum Tilt by Cicely Farrer over on their website which untangles some of the curatorial threads in the programme.
I left thinking about the former ubiquity of working horses in cities, about the difference between choosing to return and being unable to leave a small town, or being denied the right to return at all, about the precarity of city farms, the invisibility of home labour, the exploitation of land and people we can’t see, the earth deep under all our buildings.
ECOLOGIES OF LISTENING, HOSPITALFIELD, ARBROATH
25–26 July 2026
Kathy Hinde at Hospitalfield. Photo by Su Shaw.
Framed as a “Study Day”, ‘Ecologies of Listening’ at Hospitalfield was programmed as a two day event by artist-musician Su Shaw, who performs as Shhe. The schedule, of which I attended the first day, was packed but in the most gentle way—the group moving as a whole between contemplative sessions full of space to sit back (or lie down) and soak it in.
We began with a warm up by Riah Niaf from Glasgow’s Listen Gallery, who encouraged the participants to attend to our own body’s particularities as listening instruments. Instructed by Riah, individually we jiggled our knees, clenched our bums, massaged our ears before sounding out our voices together. Besides this exercise in embodied listening techniques, the audience as sound makers themselves was foregrounded—apt as a group of people probably over half of whom were artists of some description or other contributors to the programme.
We went from this extreme bodily closeness to hearing about a far away project: ‘Futures of Listening: Water Knowledge from Two Cities’. Led by music Professor Suk-Jun Kim of Aberdeen University, the discussion focussed on how listening can, in their arts based research, encourage forms of ‘water knowledge’ and empathic relations with vulnerable local communities in Kampung Kalibata Pulo, Jakarta. Livestreamed in were artist filmmaker Van Luber Parensen, field recordist, filmmaker and audiovisual artist Helmi Yusron, and writer, research and artist Dyah Nindyasari. This set up some questions to hold throughout the day: What does it mean to listen to/ in place, across barriers like distance, language and cultural difference? How do communities of listeners form, and for what purposes? What cultural norms is our listening subject to? What are the ethics of recording sounds, as cultural records? Who do they belong to? What are the boundaries of our understanding of an ecology of listening?
The ethics of listening was taken in another direction by artist-writer Johanna Linsley, who performed an excerpt of her and the late Rebecca Collins’ collaborative book, ‘Sonic Detection: Necessary Notes for Arts and Performance’, which figures around the notion of eavesdropping and draws together the pair’s experimentations in coastal locations around the UK. In one part of the reading, Johanna’s voice held onto the opening letter of each word before releasing it into full meaning; an action I found my own mouth joining in with, forming the letter dddddddddddddd or fffffffffffffffff before her reveal. Something about it accentuated the unexpected aspect of the project: you never know what you might hear. The delivery is sharp and the book documents, presents and re-configures a body of work built over many years. After the performed section, Johanna was joined in conversation by producer Becca Clark—one half of local DIY project Dundee Radio Club, of which Su is the other half. In a gesture of opening up the role of ‘sonic detectives’, Johanna asked the audience to share their stories of eavesdropping. So really, not all their stories after all?
The politics of listening-in to what is not your own was troubled through the discussion; but for me the most inspiring aspect of hearing Johanna speak was in terms of her joy in the space of collaboration that was borne through the project. She described how, with Rebecca Collins, another space formed through the collaboration that belonged to neither of them and had its own character—a space of allowance (what Rosie and I sometimes call an ‘atmosphere’) where more risky forms of experimentation and thinking can happen. I am yet to, and looking forward to, reading the book, having heard previously the record produced at an earlier moment in the project—reported on by Rebecca Wilcox when Rosie and I edited for MAP.
The event as a whole was characterised by Su’s generous approach to hosting the myriad contributors and obvious gratitude in holding the many parts of ‘Ecologies of Listening’ together. Amongst the more traditionally “studious” aspects of the study day, there were performances including those developed over recent days at Hospitalfield by the invited artists Cindy Islam, Jam Money (Mat Fowler and Martin Slattery) with Aimee Henderson on visuals, and Kathy Hinde. Instrumentation varied hugely from Cindy Islam’s new composition of dream-like synths and spoken word, Jam Money’s guitar (sometimes played with a violin bow) and bass clarinet, to Kathy Hinde’s homespun magnetic experiments with sound and light also drawing in her own livestream from a beehive in Hospitalfield’s grounds (with thanks to the obliging bee-keeper). With Kathy, who is well known for working with field recording and ecological themes, Becca again sensitively wove a discussion around Kathy’s experimental instrument making and her interest in the ways that birds and other migratory species are thought to navigate—by the earth’s magnetic field, a light-sensitive optical process, and quantum entanglement—scientific knowledge of which is still evolving.
From Jakarta’s watery communities to eavesdropped coastal towns, ecology figured across the day as a field to which we have a duty of care to listen to, and within which we participate actively as part of a more-than-human collective. Kathy’s performance ended with a prompt for the audience to play out the livestream from the hive into the room from their own devices. I didn’t really pick up on the cue at the time (perhaps a bit too absorbed), but tuned into the bees a couple of times over the weekend—not far away at my home—before Kathy packed up, filling my living room with their buzzing.
LUGHNASADH, FORGAN ARTS CENTRE, NEWPORT ON TAY
1 August 2026
Image: Holly Smith, ‘The Turning’, part of Lughnasadh 2026 at Forgan Arts Centre.
Photo by Kevin Linnett.
Photo by Kevin Linnett.
Back over on the Fife side of the Tay, Forgan Arts Centre has in the last few years emerged as a much needed community hub for artists in the area. Forgan’s seasonal festivals—of which Lughnasadh is the largest, and most musical—have become major events in the area. Lughnasadh’s musical line up is co-programmed with Newport’s own Big Rock Records, presenting Pictish Trail, Emma Pollock, Hen Hoose Collective, Roller Disco Death Party, Matt Carmichael, and Dundee favourite Holy Snakes. It’s a family friendly affair, with a visual art and workshop programme alongside the music. I got there by means of a ‘bike party'—a group ride with euro-trash blaring and marking our route over the bridge from Dundee.
The festival leans heavily on the celtic calendar and draws on rural harvest traditions, this year with emerging artist Holly Smith bringing a take on this traditional moment of celebration in ‘The Turning’. I got a free ticket to attend in return for volunteering to be a performer in Holly’s work: donning a Shetland style ‘skelker’ hat skillfully constructed by straw weaver Elaine Lindsay, with artist-made plant-dyed cape and culottes made from heavy floral fabric (a bit Von Trapp, perhaps). People and objects were delicately choreographed by Holly—whose costume featured an abundance of rusty nails and paper fasters, perhaps in more of a ‘green-man’ direction—including an oversized wreath and two huge papier-mâché masks representing ‘harvest spirits’. Peeking out through the skelker hats that covered our whole heads, we processed from the woodland, spinning and winding through the audience standing watching the music or set up in clusters on picnic blankets on the hill. By this time many festival goers had already made a straw brooch with Elaine and happily took a plant-dyed ribbon to tie to the harvest wreath—in the spirit of a Clutha tree—and were encouraged to make a wish for the changing season.
I thought again of ‘Akenfield’, the mud and trudge from which the harvest celebration emerges, of the migrant labour relied on now for picking the summer’s soft fruits. This summer, Forgan has been hosting José García Oliva, as an artist in residence working with seasonal workers in Fife (who incidentally, was another of the skelker wearers), and who will present work as part of the next seasonal festival, Samhain. This feels like a topic of growing concern to the arts: I’ve been reading off-and-on the book ‘Seasonal Matters: Rural Relations’ by Seasonal Neighbours, documenting a project where artists across Europe took on jobs as seasonal workers, and closer to home Rehana Zaman’s show ‘Plantation’, including a film ‘Soft Fruit’ made with berry pickers in Angus developed with the support of Hospitalfield, has had acclaim through presentations at Glasgow International and now tours across the UK and Ireland. This feels an essential counterpoint to address how folk cultures are woven through all our lives and customs variably. How do we (within the arts and beyond) embrace and learn about the stories and cultural celebrations of the people who ‘harvest’, now? And what’s the role of celebration when abundance simply isn’t where we are? I’ve been reading reports that 2026 is set to be the smallest UK harvest since detailed records began 42 years ago, and the earliest in 20 years. Perhaps broadcasting that wouldn’t make for such a fun day out.
Up in the dappled woodland, Eilidh Weir ran an embroidery workshop making patches celebrating worms, mushrooms, slaters and other lesser-appreciated ‘garden heroes’. Artist Maeve Totolehibe, visiting from France, held a workshop introducing Edge School: a peer-to-peer learning project produced by Rachael Simpson for local LGBTQ+ people, inspired by the history of ‘hedge schools’—clandestine community-led ‘schools’ that organised to share radical politics amid legal and social oppression in eighteenth-century Ireland. Maeve, in her workshop, welcomed festival goers to make a wax window ‘portal’ with natural materials embedded, as an intervention in the hedge itself.
We left again on bikes, music on, the organiser (my partner, ha) obviously having missed the memo to leave the residential area quietly—but we were quick at least so maybe we won’t be banned from coming back to town (!)
INTERESTING THINGS, TOLBOOTH, STIRLING
15 August 2026
Image: Lullahush, ‘Ithaca’, album cover
I travelled to Stirling by train, hot (literally) off the Edinburgh Art Festival exhibition trail, and looking for something a bit… rogue? ‘Interesting Things’—programmed in partnership with Signal Sounds—seemed the ticket: I hadn’t been in the Tolbooth in years, as Stirling’s multi-arts centre with a focus on sound the line up merged experimental music with performance art. I also hadn’t noticed on previous visits that the building clearly had the same architect as Dundee Contemporary Arts, and was developed as part of similar millennium city-regeneration plans. There was something about the mesh metal walkways, complete with buckets catching drips, that caused my brain to collapse Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow into it, and I had an overwhelming reaction to being in a full blown festival in such a building. Something like joy (?!) and keen loss, remembering Radiophrenia and Counterflows spanning the whole CCA building. At ‘Ecologies of Listening’ I’d been reminiscing with other local cultural workers about how much we missed Cry Parrot’s Dundee jaunts and Arika’s ‘Kill Your Timid Notion’ events at DCA, whose capacious architecture most local artists can agree isn’t currently meeting its full potential for the making and sharing of performance. After ‘Interesting Things’, another musician friend told me about their memories of ‘Le Weekend’, a previously long running annual music festival at the Tolbooth, and their excitement at ‘Interesting Things’ picking up a similar beat. It’s not all loss!
If ‘Ecologies of Listening’ was everyone going to the same thing, a lulling pace and gentle but firm hosting, ‘Interesting Things’ was maybe its opposite. Beginning softly with Simone Seales’ virtuosic improvisational cello, and spoken word poetry, things soon ramped up. Concurrent, or at least overlapping, performance was spread throughout the rooms stemming from the tall spiral staircase. At the top, an airy balcony to catch a breath is just off from an attic room where the most risk taking (gleefully abrasive?) work unfolded in close proximity, like The Gall’s death metal riffs and punk vocals and Speculum Bunny’s witchy modulated spoken word performance. Below that, a more mellow bar area leaked voices like those of Miwa Nagato-Apthorp and Scott William Urquhart into the stairwell, before a euphoric set by R.AGGS closed the bar. Down again, was a larger theatre space, featuring Taupe’s chaotic but sharp electro-jazz(ish?) to Lord of the Isles’ DJ set. Below which, the entrance and closed off sound recording studio was another level even lower. I don’t think I heard any announcements, apart from maybe one over the tannoy, and the audience weaved in and out of performances as they wished. It might seem like a lack of care by comparison, but I enjoyed being free and deciding whether to commit or to dip in and out, having options to fit my mood to. I had been primed for listening (well-massaged ears and what not). It cleared out a little when the last train left for Glasgow, but many musicians make a crowd and there was obviously some good local support.
In Isa Gordon and Tony Morris’ set, synth-y beats underpinned comic and very Scottish-ly acerbic spoken storytelling with a vocal back and forth between the two, as in ear worm ‘Wake up Baby’. I love coming across Tony Morris’ one minute Instagram tracks. Incidentally, I’d seen Isa’s opening set at Shhe’s ‘THALASSA’ album launch in Dundee earlier in the year, and I had been completely enthralled by her warped modern-folk covers including a riotous rendition of Robert Wyatt’s ‘Pigs... (In There)’—sadly not to be repeated.
A compelling thread that rose and fell throughout was a contemporary take on folk sensibilities, peaking in Susannah Stark & Band’s set marrying variously English and Gaelic vocals with airy trumpet trills, synth, accordion and harmonium. Including tracks from ‘Minor Gestures’, rhythmic repetition of lyrics keeps a decidedly celtic and contemporary eerie feeling. Fragmentary samples of Irish folk feature in Lullahush’s celtic electronica, the name for the musical project by Daniel McIntyre. Album ‘Ithaca’ was made with support from the Arts Council for Ireland, while the Dublin born artist lives in Athens (cheaper rent?) and again I’m thinking of ‘Akenfield’ back at ‘Maximum Tilt’. About what leaving a place does to your perception of it? What the role of traditional culture is for our lives now? The uselessness of binaries between past and present, rural and urban, being from-or-of and being not-from-or-of. Glitching and joyful, the Irish elements and snippets of conversation somehow feel more alive by means of disruption, delay and restless drums, tethered to a strong, looping and fast paced video component. Playing out summer’s end, it hit me square in the heart with the familiar melancholy of fleeting day trips, tins and pals on the beach, rockpools and the soaring call of the red-listed curlew.
Alison Scott is an artist, writer and art-worker based in Angus. She is a care-taker of PAM, Feminist Bird Club Dundee, and a board member at Generator Projects. Alison is currently a practice-based PhD researcher at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, focussing on art, forestry and the commons.
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