Transgressive North: Blending the old with the new
These are busy and exciting times for music and film collective Transgressive North. Michael Brogan tells us more:
“Founded in 2008 as an arts community with the aim of producing film and music projects, the TN has since established itself as a force to be reckoned with on the Scottish arts scene. With an equal interest in traditional Scottish arts and international contemporary culture, we have always experimented with the old and the new. Now, we very much have an eye on the future as we look forward to developing several projects over the coming months.
Since our modest beginnings as ambitious arts students, Transgressive North has worked to develop our community and work with a range of collaborators in Scotland and beyond. Our multimedia project ‘Everything Is New’ was released to critical acclaim in 2014, and featured two albums, a documentary and a feature film. We were very lucky to recruit a range of artists to contribute to the project, including Irvine Welsh, Margaret Bennett, Alexander McCall Smith, Valerie Gillies and Jarvis Cocker. Since Everything is New we have gone on to develop further rewarding with the TMF, TradFest, Edinburgh Filmhouse, Chemikal Underground records and the Martyn Bennett Trust, to help us bring our next projects to fruition.
2017 sees the return of the Folk Film Gathering, the world’s first festival of folk cinema, in partnership with Filmhouse Edinburgh and TradFest. The Folk Film Gathering is a celebration of the myriad ways in which world cinema has engaged with folk culture in different places and times – hether that’s ‘folk’ as a living tradition, as people’s history, as working class / subaltern culture, as political movement or as a ‘come-all-ye’ sense of community. Now in its third year, 2017’s Folk Film Gathering is putting a particular focus on traditional song both in Scotland and further afield, and we have been working with TMF Director Dave Francis to find an appropriate traditional singer to introduce each of the films in our programme this year. The full programme will be launched in the next few weeks – visit www.folkfilmgathering.com for more info.
Our newest project, currently in development, is a collaboration between Transgressive North, the Traditional Music Forum, The Martyn Bennett Trust, and Scotland’s pre-eminent music label Chemikal Underground. Inspired by the music and legacy of Martyn Bennett, we’re keeping a tight lid on exactly what this particular endeavour entails, but we recommend keeping an eye on our website for future announcements…”