Dr James Weeks' Plain Air released on FirstHand Records

"I have walked out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as is the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan."  

Plain Air is a musical response to one of the most extraordinary and celebrated works of nature writing in English, The Living Mountain by the Scottish writer Nan Shepherd. This 53-minute work places Shepherd’s stunning, crystalline prose within an expansive and elemental musical landscape. Pianist Siwan Rhys (GBSR Duo) creates an environment of spacious stillness, surrounded by a halo of electronic tone, while singer Lucy Goddard (EXAUDI) retraces Shepherd’s path, reciting her text simply as she goes deeper into the mountain world and into herself.  

Plain Air’s slow unfolding across almost an hour of music creates a deeply immersive listening experience in which Shepherd’s unique poetic voice, and the transcendental beauty and mystery of the Cairngorms, are vividly brought to life.  Plain Air was commissioned by Lucy Goddard and Siwan Rhys, who gave the first performance in 2022 in Durham as part of MUSICON, and perform the work on this world premiere recording.  

The recording is released on 14th August 2026 and has already been received warmly by critics:

“a stunning response to The Living Mountain. [Weeks] fills this music with that sense of space and light that can come from a day spent up on the Cairngorm Mountains.” (BBC Radio 3, New Music Show)  

“an extraordinarily brave and self-confident piece of writing, and the performance is hypnotic and engrossing… There is no development, just the careful placing of musical events, but the reward for surrendering to it is very much the musical equivalent of staring into a big sky: the passing of time and any sense of destination rendered irrelevant, until the voice and piano and their electronic frame is all there is.”  (The Arts Desk)