Alasdair Roberts and Fredrick Rasten

The duo of Scottish folk musician Alasdair Roberts and Norwegian

experimental musician Fredrik Rasten fuses their respective work

with traditional music, folk song and microtonal minimalism. Their

first encounter was in the septet Alasdair Roberts & Völvur, which

released the LP The Old Fabled River on Drag City Records in

2021.The record combined Roberts’s compositions with versions of

Scottish and Norwegian traditional songs.

On Seven Weathers, their forthcoming double album for Drag City

Records, Roberts and Rasten focus on traditional Scottish narrative

ballads, typically of long duration, where slowly evolving musical

materials build up throughout the strophic verse-structure to

emphasise the storytelling. They choose ballads with care, favouring

time-transcending narrative themes that both bear witness to the day

and age of their origin and are relevant to our times, be that

politically, culturally or ethically. Both sing and play a variety

of acoustic and electronic instruments, Roberts’s clear and

unadorned vocal delivery blending with Rasten’s sensibilities of

just intonation tuning and timbral qualities of sound.

Seven Weathers is scheduled for release in January 2027, and Roberts

and Rasten will concurrently undertake a short album launch tour.

Throughout 2024/5 they have enjoyed concerts in Glasgow, Berlin,

Prague, Motvind Festival (Norway), Fanø Free Folk Festival (Denmark)

and ne:ar Festival (Slovakia), and have an upcoming appearance at

Frequency Festival (Chicago, USA) in February 2026 as well as a

short Norwegian tour in May 2026.