Iona Zajac

Friday 14 April
The Bongo Club - 20.30-21.00

New From Scotland Showcase - Tickets

There’s an understated beauty to the work of Iona Zajac that resonates throughout her stunning new EP, Find Her In The Grass, which is released this Spring. Formed of four delicate and captivating songs, the work here is pulled from the past few years of Zajac’s life, a long and careful process that saw her own poems grow into the songs we hear on the EP. “I learned how to play guitar. I found some old poems. I turned them into songs,” the Edinburgh-born artist says simply, echoing the plaintive nature of the completed work.

A multi-instrumentalist, Zajac grew up singing and playing Scotland's oldest national instrument, the Clarsach Harp. Between 2016 and 2020 she fronted the folk-blues trio Avocet, before moving onto the solo acoustic work which so beautifully shapes the songs on Find Her In The Grass. It was while studying English Literature at Glasgow University that she also started focusing on her poetry, culminating in a collection of 20-odd poems called The Salt I have Produced.

Picking her guitar up in the early part of 2020, Zajac soon began turning the poems into songs, writing and recording amid the calm sanctity of her Glasgow flat. “I had no idea they would become songs one day, but when I realised I had all of this material, it was like a gift to myself,” she says of this time. “I’d sit in my quiet room in Ibrox and edit the lines and words together, seeing what worked when sung.”

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