The project Saor has announced new album, Caledonia. Caledonia finds Andy Marshall applying everything he has learned as a Producer, arranger, and performer over the past decade. Five compositions from Roots, Aura, and Guardians have been rebuilt from the ground up with producer Chris Fielding, and “given the scale and depth Marshall always heard in them but lacked the resources to fully realise the first time around.”
Saor took shape in Glasgow in 2013, when Andy Marshall, entirely self-taught, began writing and recording alone under the name Àrsaidh, quickly rebranded to Saor when listeners struggled with the original’s pronunciation. The name, drawn from Scottish Gaelic and meaning “free,” gave shape to what Marshall would come to call “Caledonian Metal”: atmospheric Black Metal “built on Highland landscapes, ancestral memory, and a distinctly Scottish sense of place.”
Marshall built the project almost entirely on his own terms, handling composition, vocals, and most instrumentation himself while bringing in session players to fill out the Folk instrumentation live records demanded. Roots was released in 2013. Aura followed a year later, while Guardians arrived in 2016.
After years as a largely studio-bound project, Saor began playing live with real regularity, moving through a growing run of European tour dates and festival appearances. Across six albums and thirteen years, Marshall has pushed Saor’s sound and ambition further while holding to the same essential sense of place.
Now, the album Caledonia gathers five tracks pulled from Roots, Aura, and Guardians: “Aura,” “The Awakening,” “Carved in Stone,” “Hearth,” and “Tears of a Nation,” each rerecorded in full and produced, mixed, and mastered by Chris Fielding. Many of these songs have been reshaped gradually through years of live performance, taking on new dynamics and arrangement choices that the early recordings, made with far more limited means, were never able to capture.
Guest contributions from drummer Carlos Vivas, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Ella Zlotos on tin whistle, low whistle, and Uilleann pipes, and violinist Àngela Moya Serrat round out the record’s Folk instrumentation. The album’s visual identity, cover artwork, layout, and an accompanying video for “Carved in Stone,” comes from longtime collaborator Anaïs Chareyre-Méjan.
Lyrically and thematically, Scotland’s landscapes and history, as well as “a connection to nature, heritage, and personal reflection” remain in the songs as they were first written, but they now contain what Marshall has learned since, musically and thematically.
