THE work of Aberdeen-based experimental musician Fiona Soe Paing exists somewhere in the veil between the worlds; a place which feels familiar but where the angles seem slightly off and where the colours take on an unsettling but captivating hue.
It seems somehow fitting, that the half-Burmese, half-Scottish musician wrote the songs that make up her forthcoming album, Alien Lullabies, while living on New Zealand's Waiheke Island at the off-grid Eco Village founded by the crew of the original Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior.
A collection of vocal based electronic tracks, which combine Burmese, English and abstract improvisation, the album at times seems beamed from a place several dimensions away, rather than from the other side of the planet.
The album is the soundtrack of the Alien Lullabies live show, a mesmerising performance and cinema hybrid, with projected 3D animation by Zennor Alexander, Soe Paing's collaborator since 2009.
As Soe Paing explains, Alexander also likes relative solace in which to work.
She says: "He's based in New Zealand, and lives pretty much as a hermit on a little island, shut away all day making spooky animations for my music.
"We've been working together on my tracks since about 2007. As you can guess, animation is very time consuming. He's a self taught animation artist who was looking for unusual music to practice making videos for, when he was first starting out... our initial first video then slowly evolved into a full album and live show.
"We started working together when we were both living in Brighton, and after he went back to NZ (he's a Kiwi) I went over there to carry on the collaboration, and ended up living there for two years, working on my album and collaborating on the visuals.
"When I came back to live in Scotland in 2009, we carried on collaborating online, and are still working together. He does sometimes do stuff for other people, but mostly he just concentrates on our joint project, which has morphed into the Alien Lullabies album and performance."
Ahead of the release of Alien Lullabies on August 29 2016 via Colliderscope, The National is offering the typically mesmerising Heartbeat as a free download.
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