Imagine building a rocket launchpad in a monastery. Now swap the monks for puffins and Gaelic-speaking crofters, and you’re approaching the absurdity behind "Spaceport One" - both the real-life infrastructural fever dream planned for North Uist, and this quietly ferocious sonic document by Scolpaig.

Scolpaig - the artist, not the place (though they are one and the same in spirit) - is a kind of audio-cartographer, but instead of drawing maps, they compost them. Camped on Uist for three weeks, the artist stitched together field recordings, modular synthesis, found percussion, and violin into a tapestry that manages to be equal parts protest, lullaby, and speculative folklore. If Brian Eno had lived in a tent near endangered otters while reading environmental impact reports, he might have made this album - although probably with more ambient smugness and less Hebridean grit.

There’s a deceptively light touch here. The ten tracks, each titled with numerical uniformity ("Spaceport One" through "Ten"), suggest an eerie bureaucratic inevitability, like chapters from a doomed planning application. But what lives within each piece is anything but sterile. There’s sea foam fizz in the percussion, like rocks clinking in tidal breath. There are sheep bleats, wires humming like wary insects, and a constant tension between the fragility of nature and the brutalist dream of commercial aerospace.

The album doesn’t moralise. It mourns. It listens deeply. It plays, too. On "Spaceport Four", you can almost feel someone drumming with driftwood on ancient rock, as if inviting the sea to join in. On "Spaceport Seven", a synthetic pulse arrives, like the premonition of launch, disrupting the bucolic calm with a kind of neon dread.

Scolpaig’s collaborators - Ed Parsons and John Guzek - lend percussive textures that feel archeological, as if dug from the sand rather than played. Daniel Alexander Hignell-Tully’s mix keeps everything organic yet quietly uncanny: nothing here feels exaggerated, but everything feels fragile.

The CD comes with a book - and thank goodness. The sounds don’t want to be consumed like a playlist; they want to be contemplated, revisited, argued with. This is not an album to soundtrack your brunch. It’s a sonic cairn, left for anyone who might stumble upon it once orbital ambition silences the island.

In a way, "Spaceport One" is the opposite of spaceflight. Where rockets are loud and clean and final, this album is messy, slow, patient. It loops back on itself. It rustles. It resists.

Listen to it while there’s still something to listen to. Or, more precisely, while there’s still something left to record.