Scottish artist and singer Susannah Stark’s longstanding interest in the art of song and multi-lingual creative expression inspires a songwriting process by which she aims to give voice to intangible moments of everyday life & creative inspiration in their raw form.
She first presented her work with song through collaboration with MC Don Hayden in surround sound audio for Art Basel Miami 2016, before going on to release a debut solo album of experimental pop music, ‘Time Together Hues and Intensities’ with Belgian label Stroom, that featured in Mojo magazine’s 2020 best of year charts and more.
Joining forces with trumpet player Phil Cardwell, drummer Laurie Pitt, and accordionist Caroline Hussey for form an experimental ensemble, they created ‘Mion-phuingean’ – ‘Minor Gestures’; an extended folk session in details or locations around the Govan stones, river Clyde & underground waters, and features new Gaelic songwriting. This work, a joint release with Glasgow’s Night School Records and Stroom, has taken them around Scotland, the UK and Europe and been shared on Late Junction, BBC 6 Music, fbi.radio, Super45.fm and NTS radio among other places. This year they were nominated for a Scottish Alternative Music Award. Susannah is also a part of scottish drone-folk love song project, stravsky & pelè, released on Stroom, and a vocalist for the band Wild gods.
Questions and Answers
3 FACTS
1: lived experience teaches us
2: change is constant
3: collaboration sustains creativity, not competition
11 QUESTIONS
What is the biggest inspiration for your music?
The need to communicate, feeling like there is something inside that needs to be said, to come forth, finding a ‘way’ to express this, through my voice, and/or other kinds of gesture. That is an emotional and human need.
In recent years, I’ve been inspired through practice of zazen in Glasgow, as well as ongoing learning of Gaelic, which has been possible through courses at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig on Skye.
2. How and when did you get into making music?
Though I went to piano lessons as a young person, I didn’t begin to make my own music until later just after the final year of my studies in visual art. I had felt for most of my life that I somehow needed to find a ‘way’ to express myself that existed beyond what I was making at the time in the print studio, I knew there was more to come forth. That started by writing and reading my lyrics over the top of existing songs before I got into writing my own music while on an artist residency a few years after that.
3. What are 5 of your favourite albums of all time? (yes we know it is difficult).
Cindytalk – The Wind is Strong
Talk Talk – Spirit of Eden
Lonnie Holley – Just Before Music
Navan – Mairneas
Charlie Morrow – Chanter
4. What do you associate with Berlin?
True love, kürbissuppe, disorientation, canals, candlelight, fines
5. What’s your favourite place in your town?
The Govan Stones, and the Wee Dhabba. Otherwise getting out of the city is good
6. If there was no music in the world, what would you do instead?
Just listen to what there was
7. What was the last record/music you bought or listen?
Uisce agus Bean by Róis
Collapse by Drew McDowall
8. Who would you most like to collaborate with?
Cinder (again :) )
a Gaelic choir
9. What was your best gig (as performer or spectator)?
As a spectator: Lonnie Holley at the Old Hairdressers in Glasgow last year was an intimate and unexpected pouring forthe of emotion. I also felt deeply transported by witnessing early music vocal ensemble Iuchair in the Govan Stones this year.
As a performer: We just played at Les Ateliers Claus in Brussels, with Salenta and Jordan Sand, and I really enjoyed the whole experience.
10. How important is technology to your creative process?
It’s an everyday necessity, I record and mix everything via ableton. But without it I’m sure we would find a way.
11. Please tell us more about the development of your new album Minor Gestures?
Mion-phuingean – Minor Gestures has been in the ether over the past five years since Time Together (Hues and Intensities). While the latter was a fairly solo journey responding to personal transitions and seeking, this new work has been a collaborative journey, learning from and being surrounded by generous & talented musicians and people, as well as new friends I’ve met through language learning, growing my confidence as a singer/musician, composer/arranger and improviser in a way, and in ‘softening’ adapting my voice to new registers as I am singing more often in Gaelic. The ‘minor gestures’ as I understand them are something like intuitions that preceed creative acts. What makes us choose to follow some, and not others, and the mystery of when we hit upon what feels resonating and potent is what has been fascinating me during the development of this album. I work slowly and sometimes it can sometimes be a very drawn out process. Many of these songs sounded quite different when we started playing them. Each once feels like an intimate world, that has gone on its own journey as I have re-edited and arranged things until I’m happy with them and they find their way to feeling ‘ready’.
‘Minor Gestures’ is a container for the first songs I wrote in Gaelic, since beginning to learn in 2022, engaging in ‘ways’ of expressing things differently in this language and connecting to place through storytelling in my own way.
