Love and music endureth: Lord of the Isles on letting his heritage flow through electronic music

McDonald has been an important figure on the capital’s music scene for a couple of decades now, having moved to the city from Fife to study art. Soon after arriving he and a friend secured a DJ residency at a bar called Negociants, a development that was vital in shaping his future career, though not in the exact way you might think.

“We played there from 10pm until 3am every Saturday for years. It was always packed, and it was great, but the biggest thing about it was that getting to grips with the art of mixing was what made me realise I wanted to make my own music. The idea of making something new out of two different records really attracted me, and from there it was a natural progression to start doing things myself with instruments.”

McDonald had a basic set-up of his own on which to do this (a primitive version of the production software Cubase, a sampler and a couple of synths), but in the early 2000s he also teamed up with John Vick of the Edinburgh production collective Finitribe under the name Remote Control. “John had a full studio and lots of knowledge, and back then it was still really expensive to make music,” McDonald explains. “It cost so much to upgrade the memory in a sampler, for instance, whereas nowadays a computer is like a sampler, and you can take days’ worth of samples if you want to, rather than the eight seconds you had to play with then. So being able to work with John and learn to use the equipment in his studio was a really important part of my education in music production.”

McDonald and Vick had high hopes for Remote Control, but, for reasons McDonald confesses he still isn’t quite sure of, the project never really took off, and it was discontinued in 2003. “We stopped it right after the album [Built On Volcanoes] came out,” he says ruefully. “The LP didn’t do anything, and it was obvious the project wasn’t going to go where we wanted it to, so I decided to go away and build my own studio and lick my wounds for a while. The important thing was to keep writing. Writing music is as natural to me as going for a walk in the hills – it’s a part of me to do that and it’s what I love.”

In a manner reminiscent of recent National feature subject Scott Fraser, with whom he occasionally DJs, there followed an almost decade-long hiatus in McDonald’s musical output between the end of Remote Control and the start of Lord of the Isles. And, as was the case with Fraser, the break did him a power of good. The name Lord of the Isles first appeared on the release schedules in 2011 when the Adult Contemporary label put out a two-track 12-inch called Ultraviolet, and the records have barely abated since. More than a dozen EPs have appeared since then, with a prevailing mood of melody-led, atmospheric house punctuated by the odd venture into tougher, more techno-ish sounds.

Ultraviolet was a strong early taster of the knack for melody that drives everything McDonald releases. My own first encounter with his music was 2012’s I Remember, a simple, exquisite combination of lightning-flash synth shards and a gorgeous, rolling piano melody that clocks in at under two minutes. A strikingly similar moment occurs on his recent debut LP, In Waves, with the mid-album interlude Gualainn, and I wonder if the two are products of a similar working process. It turns out that the opposite is the case: they are examples of McDonald taking wildly different routes to a similar end point.

“It’s interesting you should say that they’re similar,” he begins, “because they were created in totally different ways. I Remember took about two years to boil down to the thing it became. It was originally much longer and had a lot of beats in it and stuff, and the melody only came in later. I stripped away and stripped away and eventually ended up with just the parts of it that I thought were absolutely essential. Gualainn, on the other hand, was made from start to finish in one day. I’d been at the beach with my kids earlier and had taken a few field recordings when I was there. Then back at the house I was playing around on an old piano. Only certain sections of it are in tune now, but I took a tiny looped section of what I played on it that day, added it to the beach field recordings, and that was it done.”

I tell him that his use of field recordings reminds me of the methods of Glasgow producer Gary Caruth, aka Sad City, and McDonald tells me the pair have actually been planning a collaboration EP for several years, which should finally happen sometime in 2017. “I absolutely love his music,” he says. “And the way he uses field recordings is wonderful. I’m no expert with them, but I think they’re amazing when you’re trying to capture the atmosphere of somewhere, or capture the spirit of somewhere”

I Remember appeared in the middle of a particularly rapid-fire stream of Lord of the Isles EPs from 2011 to 2014 that only abated recently to allow McDonald to work on In Waves, which New York’s ESP Institute label released a couple of weeks ago. “The way Gualainn was made is an extreme example, but not many tracks on the album were laboured over,” he says. “These days I know if it’s a chore to get something right then I should just move onto something else, whereas in the old days I probably would have persevered and forced something to come out of it no matter how hard it was.” In Waves, as its name suggests, was created at different times over a period of years, but the way it flows makes it sound like the product of a single very relaxed session.

McDonald has several remixes, an EP or two and an ambient LP in the works for the next few months, as well as his collaboration with Sad City. With the increased profile of his music has come copious travel, for DJ and live shows, which, despite the need to juggle family and work commitments, he is refreshingly enthusiastic about. Still a full-time graphic designer during the week, he says he’d love to be able to concentrate solely on music one day, but that it’s probably not going to be a financial reality anytime soon. “I’ve never been able to get into the right headspace with music if I’m worrying about paying my mortgage or feeding my kids,” he says, not unreasonably.

Again and again, I put off asking McDonald the one question I know he’s always asked, but in the end there’s no getting around it. This is The National, and you’re named Lord of the Isles – why? “I understand,” he laughs. “I’ve just always had an interest in that aspect of our history. I was familiar with that area [the Western Isles] because of trips there as a boy, and so I felt like I had connections to it, both spiritually, and, being a McDonald, in a hereditary sense. And there’s a part of the Lord of the Isles and MacDonald clan story that I thought fit really well, which is the saying “the world will end but love and music endureth”, which is on a plaque on a memorial cairn at Duntulm Castle on the Isle of Skye.

“I realise it’s all a little grand-sounding…” he laughs. It sure is, but a certain grandness is befitting of a producer who has learned his craft at a regal pace, and ended up creating some of the most beautiful electronic music Scotland has ever produced.

Lord of the Isles’ In Waves is out now on ESP Institute