Arun Sood & Angeline Morrison's 'Donn/Dubh' Is a Genuinely Singular Listen
Arun Sood and Angeline Morrison’s Donn/Dubh, released via Real World Records, is not a record you put on in the background. Across roughly forty-five minutes, the pair thread neo-traditional Gaelic and Scottish folk material — including a rendition of a 1952 psalm recording and an old Uist song — through tape loops, drone, and electronica, working with producer Alastair Smith to build something that sits somewhere between field recording, séance, and dance-adjacent electronic music.
The Sonic Breakdown
The Production & Mix
The Low-End: Smith’s production leans into dub and drone textures that give the record a physical, almost subterranean weight, even when the arrangements are as sparse as tentative solo piano. The Spatial Dynamics: the mix moves fluidly between tape loops, steel pans, flute, fiddle, and muted electronica, building a Wickerman-adjacent gothic atmosphere on the instrumental pieces that never once tips into pastiche — it’s genuinely eerie in a way that feels earned rather than performed.
Standout Performance
The vocal tapestry across the record is its most striking element — Sood folds in his uncle’s recorded voice and his own daughters’ vocals into one arrangement, turning family memory into part of the record’s actual architecture.
Track Highlights
⚡ The opening track sets the record’s whole aesthetic in one gesture: tentative piano blooming into an emerging drone that’s simultaneously lulling and unsettling.
🌈 The closer pairs looped clarion vocals with industrial textures, a genuinely haunting way to send off a record this dense.
Donn/Dubh asks for your full attention and rewards it completely — a strange, singular listen that’s still unfolding itself a week after release. Certified.