There is a certain stillness that refuses to be ornamental. Claire M Singer’s new album, Gleann Ciùin, inhabits that stillness with a rare patience—one that feels less composed than uncovered, as though the landscape itself were teaching the music how to breathe.

Recorded between Aberdeenshire’s wind-worn peaks and the resonant interior of pipe organs, Gleann Ciùin continues the trilogy that began with Saor. Each movement unfolds as a negotiation between solidity and air, between the mountain’s weight and the sound that escapes it. The organ, usually the emblem of grandeur, becomes here a vessel for restraint; its tones hover like weather systems, drifting across a horizon mapped in overtones and slow decay.

In Turadh, the album’s opening expanse, the sense of duration feels geological—a clearing after rain, a reprieve. Coordinates become titles, as in 57.0908° N, 3.6939° W, grounding the listener in precise fragments of terrain. Yet precision here is not about measurement; it is a way of listening to place as one might read light.

Singer’s compositional method—layering cello and electronics around organ drones—retains its delicate austerity. Nothing is hurried, nothing superfluous. What might at first seem static gradually reveals movement at a molecular scale, the kind of motion that exists in lichen or mist.

If Saor traced the act of ascent, Gleann Ciùin dwells in arrival: the calm after exertion, the quiet awareness of time’s dilation. There is no transcendence sought, only an attentive coexistence with what is. The final track, which lends the album its title, closes like a held breath—neither release nor conclusion, but suspension.

Mastered by Denis Blackham and framed in Jon Wozencroft’s luminous photography, the record bears all the tactile hallmarks of Touch: an artefact of care, proportion and sonic humility.

In an era of accelerated listening, Singer’s music reminds us that sound, like weather, is never still. It simply waits for the listener to slow down enough to hear it.

James Whitfield