Matt Robin

Ancient Celts imagined sound bouncing off a cliff face or cavern wall as a child birthed by the stone. In Scottish Gaelic the word for “Echo” is  “Mac-Talla” — “The Son of the Rock”. It’s an elemental spirit, the living voice of the wilderness connected to the human world. When a bard played a lament, the landscape was believed to answer back, as if the land itself were moved to grief, memory, and participation. 

This piece was recorded inside Cathedral Cave on the Isle of Eigg, a vast volcanic sea cave beneath the pitchstone ridge of An Sgùrr. Known in Gaelic as Uamh na Chràbhaidh (“Cave of Devotion”), this resonant basalt chamber has long been associated with ritual gathering.

Within this resonant space, a shruti box produces a slow, steady drone: By pumping air through the bellows of the instrument, the vibrating reeds awaken the cave’s own acoustic body. The sound is shaped by the cave as its reflections and resonances fold back into the performance, transforming it into a dialogue with stone.

The recording is then turned back on itself. A secondary cave-captured drone becomes an impulse response, turning the cavern’s acoustic fingerprint into a sonic filter. Processed further through tape, the piece accumulates layers of acoustic memory, spectral traces in which the cave seems to sing its own memory.

Diaphane, from the Greek diaphanēs (“that which allows something to pass through”), understands the cave as a medium. In myth, caves were liminal spaces where the boundaries between human and divine, solid and fluid, visible and invisible became permeable. Abodes of nymphs, gods, and dangerous creatures, where ancestors heard the voices of their deities in the resonant acoustics of the stone. The drone becomes a conduit between the human and the more-than-human, transforming the cave into an active participant in dialogue. It is a (re)connection with a spatial artefact of geological history that invites us to listen deeply to the stone into a state of transformation and metamorphosis.

Matt Robin is a sound artist and composer working with electronics, field recordings, and percussion. His practice, both solo and collaborative, centers on exploring complexity through minimal means, using restraint to reveal sonic detail. Guided by curiosity, he explores the textures and tonal possibilities of acoustic and electronic tools through close listening and experimentation.

He is a member of NEY, a Glasgow-based trio whose work combines voice, (electro)acoustic instruments, electronics, field recordings, and live processing. NEY has released music on the label Somewhere Press, performed in Glasgow, London, and Berlin, undertaken a residency at Grabowsee in Germany, and collaborated with Colombian-born, Miami-based experimental sound artist Doris Dana.

Matt currently collaborates with artist Shola von Reinhold, weaving harp, percussion, electronics and voice. Their work explores delicate threads and sudden ruptures, where chaos coils around fragility and entanglement becomes both method and outcome.