Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Our ability to talk, to hear language being spoken is more than just the means of communication, it is a connection to the eternal, the ethereal, and to the spirit of humanity that persists in the realm of being evocative, expressive and beauty, and when we find our language being altered, being phased out by time and the lack of use, then we feel the extinction personally.

Whilst language should, and must continue to evolve, the sense of confusion we feel even from generation to generation when words change their meaning is more akin to loss, for the connection we have with our own age group is subject to the alteration and what we perceive as the acceleration of Time.

For the Scottish electronica duo Whyte, made up of Alasdair C and Ross Whyte, the period we live in, this era of climate unpredictability and change, has been accentuated by the loss we have felt as a collective, that we don’t have the language to describe the devastation we feel as we lose friends and neighbours to a disease without compulsion to do anything but Maim, inflict, and destroy.

Born out of the collaboration with Theatre Gu Leor, their intelligent, thoughtful, and highly illuminating new album, Maim, is one proudly formed out of experiment and exploration of the human dynamic and frailty that has made this particular moment in Time one that will add sentiment and poise to the way we evaluate our responses to further crisis that will now evidently come our way.

It is to language that we find ways to express our feelings of loss, and language, regardless of how it evolves, must be maintained, old dialects and mother tongues must never give way to extinction, and as we preserve ourselves and feel the testament of songs such as Oml, Creach, Gleann x Gloinne and the finale of the album in the track Marbhrann surge through our souls, so we must accept that languages seen to be a minority, that are fighting to be saved, are, like our environment, a living entity to which we have an obligation to safeguard, protect and maintain.

To damage is a fool’s pursuit, it serves no purpose, yet for Whyte, the point of Maim is to educate and enthral; a point exceedingly well made.   

Ian D. Hall