Acolyte is an Edinburgh-based poetic and psychedelic ensemble, founded in 2018. Described by The Skinny as a ‘supergroup’, Acolyte is made up of bassist Ruairidh Morrison (The Dark Jokes, The Microband), with synth and backing vocals from Gloria Black (Maranta), percussionist Daniel Hill and fronted by award-winning poet and spoken-word artist, Iona Lee. Acolyte fuse soundscapes with storytelling, hypnotic loops, harmonic depth and existential motifs to create truly unique performances and a genre-defying sound.
We sit down with Iona Lee to chat more about Acolyte before their performance at The Soundhouse Winter Festival on 1st December in Edinburgh. Buy your tickets here.
What inspired you to mix poetry with psychedelic music in Acolyte?
I think of poetry as more akin to musical composition than to literature, and many of the writers I admire work with music – Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Kate Bush, Tom Waits. Ruairidh and I fell in musical love about seven years ago and wanted to collaborate. There’s actually a home movie made by a friend of ours of a house party, and in one of the shots you can see Ru and I in the background excitedly having a conversation about the collaboration that would eventually become Acolyte. I think we originally imagined that it would be much more straightforward: me reading poems with musical accompaniment. But over the years its evolved into something much more interesting, ambitious and experimental.
How does writing for Acolyte differ from your solo poetry?
Music provides an emotional environment for lyrics to live in that is purely visceral and intuitive, whereas a page poem is a private and conscious world of its own, and has to contain its own backing music. This means that poetry for music can afford to be more straight forward, and, conversely, less specific. Writing poetry for Acolyte is necessarily a collaborative process: I am responding to musical cues and tonal shifts, interacting with rhythm. But that is freeing, rather than limiting. Its like language is the instrument that I’m playing.
What’s the dynamic like working with the rest of the band?
We’ve all been best friends for over a decade. Being in a band with your best friends is the most fun you can possibly have, though of course it can be a bit emotional at times too. We’re all sensitive artistic types who care a lot about the work and about one another. We all have various creative projects going on, but keep returning to Acolyte as a source of great creative fulfilment and camaraderie.
How do you want people to feel after an Acolyte performance?
As a band, we are interested in the interdisciplinary, and in the magical ephemerality of live performance. Gloria runs Microsteria, a club night which brings together dance, costume, music, and visuals, and Ruairidh also collaborates with sound artists and dancers in his project Nomoss. We are keen to make Acolyte performances unique and theatrical, and we give a lot of thought to the journey that we take our audiences on. We hope that people leave an Acolyte gig inspired and a little enchanted.
Which comes first in your creative process—words or music?
Its a very symbiotic process. The skeleton of every song is crafted by Ruairidh Morrison on the bass and loop pedals, and I will respond by rifling through my notebooks in search of a nascent idea or a few rhyming lines. Our songs tend to grow from there, though they will sometimes emerge from jams as well. Because we’re not writing songs in the traditional sense – with a verse and chorus and bridge – each piece takes time to figure itself out through experimentation and collaboration, with each member contributing their own insight to the process.
Acolyte will perform at Soundhouse Winter Festival, Sunday 1st December at the Traverse in Edinburgh. For tickets and full programme information, visit soundhousewinterfest.com.