Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten – “Lady Maisry” [Video]

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Alasdair Roberts & Fredrik Rasten Cast a 15-Minute Spell With “Lady Maisry”

The experimental folk duo announce Seven Weathers, a collection of traditional Scottish ballads out January 29, with an epic opening statement that unfolds like a magic ritual rather than a song.

Alasdair Roberts has spent three decades navigating the traditions of Scottish folk music across thirteen albums, and Fredrik Rasten is an Oslo/Berlin-based improviser who works with just intonation and the outer edges of acoustic sound. They first played together in 2021 as part of The Old Fabled River and have been finding new ground together since. Seven Weathers, their debut duo album, arrives January 29 and collects seven traditional Scottish ballads subjected to their particular brand of preservation-and-invention. “Lady Maisry” (Child Ballad 65) is the first thing off it, and it runs fifteen and a half minutes.

That length is not indulgence. The original “Lady Maisry” is one of the more harrowing tragedies in the Child Ballad canon, and Roberts and Rasten give it the space it demands. The melody here is Rasten’s own composition; two voices move through dozens of verses over meticulously placed acoustic and electric instrumentation, the whole thing accumulating weight as it goes. By the end it does feel less like a song and more like something you have passed through. The accompanying video matches that sense of duration and ritual.

The album’s seven tracks range from the intimate to the sprawling, with some reaching that fifteen-minute mark. Roberts brings his deep knowledge of Scottish tradition; Rasten brings alternative and additive tonalities and an improviser’s instinct for when to hold back and when to push. The pairing results in something genuinely rare: folk music that sounds both ancient and entirely uncharted. The duo follows the album’s January 29 release with a UK and Ireland tour through February.

Pre-Order Seven Weathers ↗

1Lady Maisry

2The Bonny Hind

3Thomas the Rhymer

4The Water o Wearie’s Well

5Hind Horn

6The Wife of Usher’s Well

7Callieburn