Capturing the sounds of Orkney 2025

The sounds of Orkney sport will echo in music around Orkney’s iconic St Magnus Cathedral next summer, alongside voices from island groups involved in the 2025 Island Games, as part of a project celebrating the culture of Orkney and its fellow island communities.

Well-known local sound artist and traditional music performer, Brian Cromarty, was selected by the Council’s Arts Service earlier this year following an application process to compose a 2025 Island Games soundscape.

Brian has been gathering audio from Orkney's sporting community over the past few months, and will be composing music from the ‘found sounds’ ahead of the Games. The resulting soundscape will be complemented by snippets of dialogue gathered from the 24 competing island groups.

Brian’s vision is to process and reframe the collected audio alongside sounds from Orkney's natural world and present them in a musical piece alongside more recognisable musical instruments.

"I've done a couple of projects like this before" he says. "Previous compositions have seen bandsaws and wind turbines turned into melody, with welders, knitting machines and sea sounds from the Fall of Warness taking on a percussive role. I never know till I start processing the sounds how they will turn out, but it's an exciting way to make music and I'm looking forward to taking what I've collected into the studio."

The project dovetails with the companion scrivener project, being led by local writer Gabrielle Barnby - Gabrielle is currently calling for written submissions centred on island identity, a selection of which will be recorded and form an interactive element of the soundscape. Brian will also support Gaby in her work as Games Scrivener and story gatherer to suggest and collect representative sound fragments from each island group remotely.

"Once Gaby's project has taken shape, we're going to ask some of the contributors to record themselves reading out selections of dialogue and send them over to me. These are going to be presented interactively alongside the soundscape so visitors will be able to hear voices from hopefully all 24 participating islands.”

Funded and led by the Council’s Arts Development Service, the final composition will play in the Cathedral, against the visual extravaganza of the St Magnus Sails – a large scale collaborative installation comprising fourteen 4.2m high sails made in 1993 for the St Magnus Festival and strung from the Cathedral’s dramatic vaulted ceiling.  They were last exhibited in 2017. 

The St Magnus Sails are painted with images inspired by a series of one-line poems, specially written for the project by George Mackay Brown on the theme of Earl Rognvald's epic voyage to Jerusalem in 1151 – by artists Andrew Parkinson, Erlend Brown, Dave Jackson and Mary Scott.