This article, written by artist Natasha Kitty Katt, describes her latest album, ‘The Stone Tape Confessions’. You can listen to Natasha’s work via Bandcamp, YouTube Music, and Spotify.

What is Auld Reekie Nocturne?

Auld Reekie Nocturne is a dark electronic project I created around a lifelong fascination with all things macabre, particularly the darker history of my home city, Edinburgh. The album, ‘The Stone Tape Confessions’, takes eight stories, places and people from Edinburgh’s past and turns them into music through synths, vocals, guitar, field recordings and spoken elements.

Edinburgh feels perfect for a project like this because its dark past is never far away. You can walk down a familiar street and suddenly discover somebody was executed there or is buried underneath you. The tracks move through different parts of that history.

Image Credit: Jeff Simpson

Dance With Devils looks at the Scottish witch trials, Meet the Maiden centres on the Edinburgh Maiden, Buried Close is about Mary King’s Close and plague-era Edinburgh, and Greyfriars Prayer looks towards the Covenanters and Greyfriars. Deacon By Day, Devil By Night is based around William Brodie, the respected tradesman who lived a criminal double life; Vault of the Damned goes underground into the South Bridge Vaults. Cold Blood Currency explores Burke and Hare, while Knox Doctrine follows Dr Robert Knox and his connection to Burke and Hare, who supplied bodies to his anatomy school.

Where did it come from?

I grew up in a B&B in Edinburgh, and my mum used to get free tickets for the ghost tours around town. From a young age, I was hearing stories about witches, body snatchers, executions, graveyards, murderers and ghosts. I absolutely loved it. I was one of those kids who wanted to hear the horrible story rather than look away from it. I became fascinated not only by what had happened, but where.

Image Credit: Jeff Simpson

Music eventually became the biggest part of my life, but that interest never disappeared. After years of producing and DJing electronic music, it clicked that these two sides of me could exist together.

The Stone Tape Confessions

The album title comes from the paranormal idea known as the Stone Tape theory: that a place can absorb or retain the energy of something that happened there, almost as if the environment itself has recorded it. I find the idea fascinating, and it made complete sense for Edinburgh.

There are layers of history everywhere here. Streets sit over older streets, closes have disappeared, and vaults sit underneath the city. I loved the thought that these places could have held on to what they had witnessed. That is where the “confessions” part came in. The idea was almost that the city was giving those stories back.

Image Credit: Glenda Rome

Making the Album

Research became a much bigger part of the project than I expected. I spent time reading, visiting museums and historic locations and speaking to people connected to the city’s history. I wanted the music to have atmosphere, but I didn’t want to take a real event and turn it into something detached from what actually happened.

The filming became a huge part of it too. We shot around Greyfriars, the Royal Mile closes, North Berwick, East Lothian, and inside the underground vaults. For Meet the Maiden, I filmed beside the actual Edinburgh Maiden at the National Museum of Scotland, which was quite surreal after spending so much time researching it. The other part of the video was filmed in the Banshee Labyrinth, often described as one of Edinburgh’s most haunted pubs, which felt like the perfect setting for the track.

For the vaults material, I interviewed Jamie Corstorphine from City of the Dead inside the vaults themselves, as well as at the Black Mausoleum in Greyfriars, a location long associated with reports of violent poltergeist activity.

Finding My Voice

The project has taken me into completely new musical territory. I’ve spent years DJing and producing, but I had always been hesitant about using my own voice. I wanted to sing, but I had built it into a much bigger thing in my head. Once I started recording, however, I realised my voice suited the darker music I was making. My voice naturally sits lower, and instead of fighting against that, I started using it.

Image Credit: Jeff Simpson

There are sung vocals, spoken parts, whispers, and different characters throughout the album. Meet the Maiden was one of the biggest steps because I sing throughout the track from the perspective of an imagined executioner. Deacon By Day, Devil By Night became the first time I had played guitar on one of my own releases.

It has genuinely changed how I see myself as an artist. I feel like I’ve finally found a space where my voice makes sense.

What Comes Next?

My main hope is that people hear the album and want to know more about the stories behind it. If somebody ends up reading about the Edinburgh Maiden, the witch trials, Mary King’s Close, Burke and Hare, or Deacon Brodie because of a track, I’d love that.

The project has already grown beyond the album, with two full music videos, additional filmed material and an illustrated zine. My next ambition is to bring all of that together and develop Auld Reekie Nocturne into an immersive live show with the International Ghost Society, also based in Edinburgh. I want to sing the material live and bring the history, music and visuals together properly. I’d like it to feel like people have entered the world of the project rather than simply come to watch me play an album.

I’ve spent my whole life surrounded by these stories. Now I finally have somewhere to put them.

For more information, contact Natasha at Natashakittykatt@gmail.com or visit the project’s Instagram page, @auldreekienocturne.