RANT with The Ledger

Lauded individually as soloists, fiddle-players Bethany Reid, Gillian Frame, Lauren MacColl and Anna Massie weave a mesmerising tapestry of sound when they come together as RANT. Formed in 2013, the quartet have garnered an international reputation for haunting reels, strathspeys and jigs that evoke the landscape and history of their home areas of Shetland and the Highlands. Their latest album, The Portage, was hailed by Folk Radio UK as “invigorating, bewitching and beautiful".

That description aptly describes The Ledger: a unique musical undertaking by three of folk’s brightest contemporary stars. Singer-songwriter Findlay Napier, fiddler/vocalist Gillian Frame and multi-instrumentalist Mike Vass have mined an iconic book of Scottish folk songs, itself originally inspired by a series of newspaper cuttings pasted into an old ledger by Findlay’s grandfather. The result is folk music gold: a series of haunting songs such as Baloo Baleery and Jamie Raeburn, that tell important stories about Scotland’s past and future.