Lau and Kan fiddle-player Aidan O’Rourke is releasing a new album of compositions titled Hotline.

Commissioned by the An Tobar Arts Centre in the Isle of Mull, Scotland as part of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad, the work was inspired by the creation of TAT-1 (TransAtlantic Telephone No.1), the world’s first submarine transatlantic telephone cable system. It was laid between Gallanach Bay, just outside O’Rourke’s hometown of Oban, Scotland, and Clarenville, Newfoundland. TAT-1 carried the Moscow-Washington Hotline between the American and Soviet heads of state.

O’Rourke writes: 

When I was wee my dad told me there was a building outside Oban that housed a cable that connected the world. I was always aware that potentially world-changing conversations were happening down the cable on the sleepy west coast of Argyll. I liked that. This music was inspired by the TAT-1 project (that cable), as a feat of engineering, but also by the feelings I had growing up in rural Argyll – which very occasionally felt like the centre of the Universe.

As well as O’Rourke on fiddle, Hotline features Phil Bancroft (tenor saxophone), Paul Harrison (piano and synths), Catriona McKay (harp) and Martin O’Neill (bodhrán and percussion).

Listen below to the opening track. Hotline will be released on Reveal Records on 1 July.

revealrecords.co.uk