Wind Song - sounding the islands

Wind song / Sinkin - a collaboration with Alex Brown and Rosie Blake.

Alex Brown is a musician and music therapist working in the community with marginalised groups and individuals.

Our combined areas of interest have led to a burgeoning practice of experimental vocal workshops exploring connection and deepness, as well as live sound and music works.

We are interested in the softness, vulnerability and openness of voice as a gentle resistance to the hardness of borders and boundaries, as well as the role of free improvisation in creating spaces of play, spontaneity and novel ways of being together.

Rosie and Alex presenting at the Island Symposium - ‘Island narratives of kinship, place, and the weather’, April 2025. Image credit: Duncan Macleod

In April 2025 we presented at the Island Symposium, a 2-day hybrid event was hosted by the University of the Highlands and Islands, and organised by Dr. Iain Robertson, Associate Professor of Historical Geography, Centre for History, UHI, and Dr. Laura Denning, independent artist & researcher, Associate Lecturer, University of Plymouth.

"This Symposium explored island narratives of kinship and place, understood as and resonate with multiple manifestations of heritage such as (but not confined to) ecological, socio-cultural, and gendered knowledges, and to which we drew artistic and other forms of (environmental) humanities responses. It was held online (hosted by UHI) and in person, at Ceolas on South Uist."

We presented two songs, exploring kinship with the landscape of Uist and the technique of deep listening, developed by composer Pauline Oliveros. We then invited the audience to participate in an experimental vocal exercise responding to three elements of the island's natural environment, remembered or imaged.