HERE are two collaborative folk projects, recorded in remote Scottish communities but at a very different pace.

With Idlewild dormant, band leader Roddy Woomble applied for funding to make his second folk album at his local arts centre in Tobermory, on the Isle of Mull, where last year musicians would combine playing gigs with chipping in instrumentation for Woomble. Often he would not know what they had contributed until hearing the recordings.

Jazz pianist Chick Lyall, saxophonist Rob Hall, Lau fiddler Aidian O’Rourke, accordionist Phil Cunningham and Dundonian singer-songwriter Michael Marra all played their part, but it is much Woomble’s record, bonded by the troubled alliance between nature and man, old ways and the new.

Far slower in gestation was Kenny Anderson and Jon Hopkins’ labour of love in Anstruther, Fife, spanning seven years of re-interpreting obscure King Creosote songs, sung anew over musical backdrops and found sounds arranged by Hopkins to create a “soundtrack to a romanticised version of a life lived in a Scottish coastal village”.

Bike wheels, spring tides, tea-cup clatter and café chatter contribute to a lovely, lyrical, scenic album as spacious and timeless as Talk Talk’s Spirit Of Eden and Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.