RUBY PESTER, NADIA ROSSI, RACHEL WALKER & CATHERINE WEIR: Self-Directed Residency, 2014

On January 18th 2014 we (Ruby Pester, Nadia Rossi, Rachel Walker and Catherine Weir) strapped as many musical instruments, art materials and bottles of whisky to our persons as was humanly possible, left the bright lights of Glasgow (European City of Culture 1990) and headed off into the rural Highlands for our week long residency at Inshriach Bothy. The core objective of our residency was to tear ourselves away from the distractions and relentless humdrum of everyday living so that we could spend time together, alone, finding and developing our collective artistic and musical voice.

Over the next seven days we immersed ourselves in a rigorous and punishing regime of early morning noise yoga sessions; freeform orchestral rock plunging masterclasses; percussive tree hugging symposiums and various other exercises carefully designed to help us galvanise our strong sense of cosmic sisterhood and ultimately establish our sound.

A total of 45 tracks were laid down over this period using various traditional and less traditional music making techniques. The list of titles penned includes many future classics such as “Psychic Orgasm”, “Hot As Hell”, “I Am My Mother”, “Don’t Colonise Me”, “Salted Crystals”, “We DIdn’t Even Make A Dent In It” and “Shitterbockerglory”.

An integral part of our song writing and image making process was our nightly post dinner session of the game Exquisite Corpse therefore we had originally thought it fitting to write our end of project report with this very same method. It of course turned out to be utter bollocks in isolation but here it is anyway, our report in it’s rawest form:

Cosmic Sisterhood
Four bodies in a wood
Not Dead
But
ALIVE, Aligning
And Axing
The kindle
In a universal rhythm
And rhyming
Under a tin roof
Corrrrugating
Ridging and grooving
In the soul
Hot hot heat
In the face…
Sweat glands exercised in the
horse-box sauna with a dram
Companionship
We reject the time and machines and are
led by the daylight and
the moonlight
Enjoying watching small birds on the
bog. Muddy feet up hills
and 25 husky dogs on a chain,
snarling at our egg maracas
We shake
shake, bake
kneading and beating
whipping and eating
Swapping bed fellows, pillows, ideas.

In September 2014, 8 months after our original voyage into the woods, we undertook a new residency in Glasgow’s Project Room now joined by Sarah Messenger our picture was complete.  Now a 5 piece we fed everything we had learned at Inshriach and all new influences from Messenger directly into the development of our new band: Fallope & The Tubes. This process culminated in what was a pretty well received debut performance and as a result we are now currently in the process of raising funds for our first EP and music video.