Music: Three's the magic number as stars align for sound artistry

Rankine, who as part of 1990s duo Ruby made her lipstick-smeared mark as the industrial/triphop provocateur 20 years ahead of her time, will play from her recent Waiting For The Light album after a DJ set from the astonishing Ela Orleans.

It was at the recent launch of the Poland-raised, Glasgow-based composer’s Dante-inspired double album Circles Of Upper And Lower Hell where the three hatched the plan for tonight following a series of chance meetings and inspired opportunities.

“I used to live in Brighton which is where I first got into more dance music,” says Soe Paing.

“I heard the Ruby song Paraffin, and it really stopped me in my tracks, I thought: ‘Oh god, what’s this?’” she says. “And years later, in May, we actually ended up doing a wee tour together, which was great. Lesley lives just outside Dumfries. And in October last year I played a tiny venue in Gatehouse of Fleet and a friend of hers was there. He linked us up, and she asked if I wanted to go on tour with her.

“I just turned up on her doorstep. We just took it for granted that we’d get on and thank god we did as it was just two of us in a car for a fortnight. And it turns out that Lesley is a really good friend of Ela. We both went to the launch of Ela’s album and we all chatted about my launch. We were all like: ‘Yeah! Let’s do it!’”

Brighton was also where Soe Paing met Alexander Zennor who created the animations accompanying each of the 12 tracks on Alien Lullabies, an unsettling album which recalls the pitch-shifted phantasms of Fever Ray and Suuns’s writhing electro.

Among the layers and textures are excerpts from Daphne Oram, the founder of the Doctor Who-soundtracking Radiophonic Workshop, and someone you can imagine being here if only Jon Pertwee could reverse the polarities.

Beaming English, Burmese and wordless vocal sounds from a long-lost Apollo mission outpost, Alien Lullabies heaves with longing; a humanoid’s lament for a time they never knew.

Odd then, that Alien Lullabies was created, not amid the rain-lashed concrete of Blade Runner cities like Manchester or Glasgow but while Soe Paing was living in Waiheke Island in New Zealand, the off-grid village created in 1985 by the crew of Greenpeace’s original Rainbow Warrior.

Bound for a nuclear test site, French intelligence bombed and sank the vessel as it left Auckland Harbour.

“I was working for a lady who was one of the original crew,” says Soe Paing. “I would help her out with olive and grape picking. It was completely isolated and you had to walk down this zigzaggy forest path to get to it, or else go by boat. It had a composting toilet and a hot-tub bath, no internet and its own beach.

“I could feel totally at ease singing all day and not worry what the neighbours would say. If paradise exists, this is it for sure.”

That sense of yearning, of longing for something but not knowing quite what it is, Soe Paing says, comes from her lost Myanmar/Burmese family.

“My dad died when I was about four. He was over here on his own, in the Burmese merchant navy on some sort of exchange when he met my mum.

“Because of the political situation, there was no way of contacting them until things finally became a bit more open. That wasn’t until my late 20s and we could only get a week’s visa. Since then we have all lost touch again. They remain the unknown.”

When it came to writing lyrics, she often found her ideas more suited to the rhythms and sounds of a Far Eastern language rather than English’s flat clunk.

“I thought maybe I could get someone to sing in Japanese, then I thought: “Hang on a minute”. I went to get the Burmese phrasebook that I’d taken on that trip. I remember opening it a section called: “In the restaurant”.

“So in the record, there is definitely something like: “Can I have a fork, please?

“It’s the classic thing of singing into the shampoo bottle. As long as you sing it with sincerity and meaning, that’s what counts.”

Tonight, Stereo, Glasgow: 7pm, free.

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