BOLD is the word for an album that starts in sacred history and ends up somewhere between a lullaby and a looming, late-night haze. Donn/Dubh (Black/Brown), from Angeline Morrison and Arun Sood, takes old Gaelic texts and tunes and threads them through distortion, drone, dream-pop and post-rock.

According to a new report, the pair draw on Hebridean heritage and an unlikely sourcebook: Saltair na Rann, a 10th-century Celtic collection of cantos where sacred history is foretold and even the winds are given colours. Morrison and Sood take that idea of a tinted world and expand it into a wider spectrum of northerly and westerly shades.

This isn’t cleverness for cleverness’ sake. The whole premise hinges on a simple, thrilling question: what happens when you treat ancient material like living matter, not museum glass? Here, traditional Gaelic elements don’t sit politely in the mix; they’re soldered into it, pushed and pulled until the seams become part of the beauty.

Both artists arrive with the right toolkit. Morrison, a co-founder of the Black British Folk Collective, has spent years bringing forgotten Black histories into the folk canon, including on her 2022 album The Sorrow Songs. Sood’s 2022 release Searching Erskine used sonic collage and old recordings to conjure the lives of residents on his grandmother’s abandoned home island of Vallay.

On Donn/Dubh, those instincts meet in Alastair Smith’s production. Morrison’s voice is described as deep, shifting from ghostly to lullaby-warm, while the surrounding soundworld nods to the shuddering shadows of late-90s Boards of Canada and Unkle, with shades of Twin Peaks in the atmosphere.

The result is folk music that refuses the usual sepia filter. Donn/Dubh doesn’t just modernise old forms; it makes them strange again, which might be the most faithful thing you can do with a text that once gave colours to the wind.