About

Between the remembered and the anticipated is the now.
We are weaving the remembered and anticipated together, we are weaving the now.

Amble Skuse – Biog

Amble Skuse is a musician and artist, working with found sound, voices, electronic processing, and site specific locations. She works with oral history archives, interviews, community memories, radio interviews, found sounds and site specific compositions to explore myriad identities in myriad locations.

She explores these ideas of identity and power through a lens of intersectional feminism. Her focus is on disability, and she is currently studying for a PhD looking at ways in which a disabled composer / performer can ustilise technology as a tool for composing, improvising and performing.

Her work has been featured on BBC Radio 3’s Late Junction, and has taken her across the world, from Edinburgh to Singapore on a 10,000 mile train journey, to Canada to develop an improvising platform with disabled musicians, to China to explore the role of ‘being’ in improvisation, to Croatia to perform with the female coding ensemble OFFAL. She is a Creative Entrepreneurs Fellow and a BBC Performing Arts Fellow. She holds an AHRC scholarship for her research.

What people say

« Skuse’s laptop textures offer slow-burning, elemental accompaniment throughout: flutters and shutter-clicks in The Dun Broon Bride, watery bubbles in Babylon, and falling rain in the beautiful closer, Long A-Growing, in which the grass keeps on lengthening in life as well as in death. So many intricate ideas here, so beautifully done. » – The Guardian

 

« Spectacular… groundbreaking even. It opens the shutters to something entirely original » – fRoots

 

« …passages of great liminal mystery and power, echoing and remoulding the lyrical contents – ballads of murder and death – to create huge, all-encompassing soundworlds that gives the material a powerful new lease of life… essential listening for fans » – Songlines

 

« …pays its respects to the past, while reaching forward into innovative new technologies. The piano harmonies are understated and complex, and the electronics whisper like ghosts… » Wire Magazine

Achievements

Amble’s work has been performed internationally from Slovakia to China, by ensembles such as Mr McFalls Chamber, Red Note Ensemble and Rarescale. In 2012 she undertook the prestigious Adopt a Composer project for Sound and Music and Making Music UK. She was one of five Creative Scotland International Creative Entrepreneurship Fellows for 2013, a BBC Performing Arts Fellow (2013), has gained several large scale grants from Creative Scotland to produce work and was recently awarded a BBC alumni fellowship. She holds an AHRC Scholarship for her PhD research.

Her work Memory Lane with Kris Drever (of Lau) was featured on Radio 3’s Late Junction with Max Reinhardt, her work Chapels with Splendid Glass Windows was featured on BBC Scotland’s Classics Unwrapped, and her project Remembered Imagined played to packed houses in 2013 and was reviewed in The Scotsman as “fearless innovators” and “a web of influences and interconnections” The piece Clachan Beo from this performance was described as “the natural melodies in a South Uist’s man storytelling served as launchpads for Skuse’s witty, skittering music… Old tunes, maybe, but magically fresh takes on them.”