Peter Margasak: "Sholto Dobie is a name that has stuck in my memory whenever it was that I first encountered it, and it’s surfaced regularly in recent years, both on recordings or concert listings. But I’d never actually heard anything by the Vilnius-based Scotsman until last November when he played a wonderful set at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, where he patiently wandered around the seated audience with a pair of jerry-rigged concertinas—at least, that’s they looked like. He held one in each hand, letting the instruments dangle from one end, activated with gentle gestures as if absentmindedly playing with a yo-yo in slow motion. They produced a lovely sound—hushed, fragile, unstable, softly wheezing—which was enhanced by some delicate vocalization. The perspective of audience members changed as he moved about. The simple elegance and unabashed modesty of the performance was just as beguiling as the irregular but soothing sounds Dobie generated.
The performance wouldn’t have made a lot of sense on a recording without the spatial qualities and Dobie’s tender presence, which made it all feel like a cross between a ritual and a family gathering. Since then I’ve been checking out his recordings, which are all over the place, particularly a series of wide-ranging duo projects. He builds his own instruments, usually from repurposed materials, and he’s not so concerned with their durability or how they hold pitch. In a short interview with It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine in 2022 he said:
Making instruments has always been a way to explore sound worlds that I feel I cannot reach by other means. Often they begin with an imagined sound, the sound doesn’t exist, or maybe it does, and making the instrument would be a way to get there. Most of the time, they would fail, as I’m not a real instrument builder. But the results would have their own idiosyncrasies and limitations which would have their own logics, and dictate different musical structures and ways to perform.
In a world where recordings too often define how music is transmitted or judged, Dobie is radical, preferring the intimacy and immediacy of small gatherings, engaging in collaborations for their social and creative potential as much as musical value. His work is decidedly homemade, and despite the fact that it’s not really designed as a “product” most of his recordings are interesting and compelling in shifting ways. He’s got a particular interest in air-driven sounds, building organs and other pipe-centered devices, such the table organ and hurdy-gurdy used on his meditative 2020 tape Nevery (Thanet Tape Center), where simple lines and drones collide and unfurl with or without the presence of field recordings. He used a synthesizer and hurdy-gurdy on The After Swell (Infant Tree), a 2022 collaboration with Malvern Brume, on sampler, that culled five concise pieces from three 30-minute improvisations. The music toggles primitive electronic tones, striated hurdy-gurdy drones, and lots of tape hiss or room noise."