Dohnavùr - We Owe Each Other Everything Dohnavùr

Ali O'May and Frazer Brown first met in early 2018, performing with their respective bands at an Electronic Music Open Mic (EMOM) night in Edinburgh. A shared musical sensibility was immediately apparent, and a few months later Ali handed Frazer a USB drive loaded with stems recorded directly from his vast modular system. Over the summer and autumn of 2019, Frazer took around a dozen of those stems as the foundation for a collection of tracks, shaping them into fully realised pieces spanning techno, lo-fi, breaks, acid house and ambient.

And so the Dohnavúr method was born: Ali coaxing raw materials from his modular setup, and Frazer working them up instinctively — his encyclopaedic knowledge of electronic music guiding the feel, genre and direction suggested by Ali's foundational building blocks. It's a genuinely unique way of working, and the results speak for themselves.

Taking their name from the Bridge of Weir family home where Ali grew up, fifteen miles west of Glasgow, the newly formed Dohnavúr released their debut album, You Can and You Shall — a joyously diverse collection, full of innovation and brimming with promise.

Just two weeks after its release in March 2020, the pandemic brought the world to a standstill. Resourceful as ever, Ali and Frazer sought out kindred spirits and labels. They found one in Castles in Space, who had put out a call for lockdown recordings for The Isolation Tapes — a release in aid of the Cavell Nurses Trust. Dohnavúr submitted "Surmonter" (French for Overcome), a long, paranoid, snarling mood piece that confused and delighted compiler Colin Morrison in equal measure. It was given pride of place as the opening track in the downloads section of the album, which went on to win Compilation of the Year at the Electronic Sound 2020 Awards.

Now, We Owe Each Other Everything continues to redefine the Dohnavúr method. Built once again from a new set of modular creations by Ali, and expertly shaped by Frazer in his Armadale studio, it's an extraordinarily diverse and exciting collection — cohesive yet wide-ranging, this is music that hits you directly in the heart and the solar plexus. It makes you feel things.

Side one opens with the sawtooth resonance of "Flowers in the Barrel", moves through the clattering momentum of "Ready for '91", and arrives at "Make It in Livingston" — a darkly ominous commentary on the new town where Frazer grew up. Side two delivers the haunting beauty of "Acetylene", the cinematic, eighties-inflected uplift of "Powerless", and closes with "Unwavering" — an emotional gut-punch featuring vocals from Emile Wauters (aka Autumna) that once heard will not be forgotten. This is Frazer in excelcis, doing that thing that only this music can do - elation and melancholy hand in hand.

We Owe Each Other Everything is Dohnavúr at their most powerful and assured: two musicians with a singular creative chemistry, making music that is impossible to categorise and impossible to ignore.