A hill repeating its own name. Ben Beinn [mountain mountain].

Poole’s new album Ben Beinn follows 2024’s In a River Shadow, further exploring an electronic folkway rooted in the abstraction of the elemental. If the previous record moved with flowing water and submerged folk song, Ben Beinn climbs into elemental instability: passing storms, coded skies, and sodden ground.

Across the album, Poole creates a phantasmic Celtic New Age sound world that’s marked by microtonal harmony, and swelling dissonance. Voices in Gaelic, Norwegian, and English surface and dissolve, stretched beyond recognition — more weather than word.

The ten-song cycle opens with 1000, where bagpipes and strings emerge from mountain icicles and frozen streams. At its centre sits Leaf, where the skittering squelches of moss, mud, and grass form a slippery rhythmic kaleidoscope. The album closes with 365 Days of Rain, turning rainfall data into a lattice of rhythm that slips from metrical order into converging motifs.

Ben Beinn is a located listen, shaped by recordings of frozen hill passes, storms, and the granite and basalt of the West of Scotland. Rather than simply reflecting place, these recordings press against it, layering the sonic materiality of landscape with synthesis and song. The album sits at an inflection point between fabrication — folk music as performed identity, a carrier of story — and its obfuscation through digital networks, where tradition refracts into plural forms.

Reference points include the emotionally saturated textures of Inoyama Land and the folk-electronic hybrids of Eli Storbekken. It tunes biophony to the hyperrealist processes of Noah Creshevsky, drawing as much from Galen Tipton’s sonic adventures as from the disquieting simulations of James Ferraro.

Ben Beinn continues Poole’s excavation of environmental and folk material through contemporary methods. Shaped by the slow pressures of land and sky — a music of erosion, recurrence, and elemental presence.