The Island Tapes

PLEASE NOTE that this DVD is dual format and should be playable on any machine supporting either PAL or NTSC format (worldwide). Region 0 (worldwide).

(May 2008) (70mins CD plus 150mins DVD)

A combined CD and DVD double pack - using silent black and white films from the Scottish Screen Archive as a backdrop to a live film music score, The Island Tapes is a fusion of Celtic guitar and Gaelic song.

Featuring acoustic guitarist David Allison, classical player Allan Neave, fingerstylist Ian Melrose and singer Alyth McCormack.

The films come from the Scottish islands of the 1920s and 30s and feature: crofting on Skye, holidays on Harris, the Handba' Game from Orkney and a remarkable record of a now largely forgotten craft in Shetland - making a keshie, a type of heavy-duty basket suitable for carrying home the peats, from the stalks of the harvest.

Includes the full soundtrack as an audio CD, plus all six Island Tapes films with soundtrack on the double sided DVD, plus extra features including interviews, live concert footage and tour blog.

The DVD is 16:9 widescreen, region-free, with UK PAL on one side and North American NTSC format on the other.

"Each [film] gets a very different but sensitively judged treatment, led by one or other of the players who chose the films they themselves wanted to work on. It's not so much an accompaniment as a response to the images and narratives of the film. The music for the St Kilda film in particular, shot only a couple of years before the islanders were finally evacuated, captures both the archaism of the islanders' lives, like something out of the mid-19th century, and somehow implies the sorrow of the leave-taking that, evidently, will have to come soon." (The Times)