Andrew Wasylyk & Tommy Perman at Gullivers

Two powerful Scottish artists come together for an intimate, audio-visual performance at Gullivers this September, combining meditative jazz, neo-classical and electronica.

One half of this collaborative project, Andrew Wasylyk is a composer and producer whose last four releases have been nominated for the Scottish Album of The Year Award. Shining brightly among these releases is 2020’s Fugitive Light And Themes of Consolation, selected as Album Of The Year by BBC Radio 6 Music’s Gideon Coe. The record unearths and reshapes the landscape of Eastern Scotland as shimmering, cinematic instrumental music, its arrangements aglow with subtle shifts of texture and refractions of melody that circle internal and external landscapes for meaning. Wasylyk’s last record, Parallel Light (2023), offers an alternative perspective on the aforementioned one, peeling layers away from the original arrangements and revealing the tracks’ warm centre in soft-focus.

As for this new project’s other half, Tommy Perman is a prolific artist, designer and musician with an interest in the spaces where these disciplines meet. He’s released over 50 records, the most recent being a collaboration with classical guitarist Morgan Szymanski called Music for the Moon and the Trees (2022, Blackford Hill) – a thing of serene beauty and quiet innovation. Perman has also exhibited around the world, including having his visual work projected onto the Sydney Opera House. And then there’s his penchant for more outlandish projects including co-releasing a playable record made of chocolate, and co-creating an “emotional robot band” called Cybraphon, which scooped him a BAFTA and is now part of the permanent collection in the National Museum of Scotland.

So what happens when these two powerful creative voices come together? We’ll find out in full in August, when their long-awaited, improvisation-born album Ash Grey And The Gull Glides On is released on the Clay Pipe Music label. But two singles give us a good inkling. Conjuring shades of Manchester band GoGo Penguin, ‘Communal Imagination’ is built on Wasylyk’s contemplative, reverb-drenched piano and Perman’s propulsive, subtly Balaeric electronica, decorated with synths and brass as the track progresses towards some transcendental realm. ‘Spec of Dust Becomes A Beam’ is a more a lively concoction of piano, vibraphone, saxophones and Radiophonic Workshop-style synths, igniting into an expansive, kosmiche four-to-the-floor crescendo. Both tracks are flooded with a sense of warmth, openness and curiosity, and hint at a gem of an album to come.

The product of two artists at the height of their powers, this 10-song collection drops on 30 August, giving you a couple of weeks to wrap it around your ears before the intimate Gullivers gig on 11 September.