Multidisciplinary artist Bianca Scout and producer Cajm share an alchemic ability to conjure spectres from sound. Both use electronics, loops and samples to evoke the edges of consciousness and preternatural memories. Together, they’re working towards an album – the follow-up to Scout’s excellent, haunted 2024 release Pattern Damage – via a performance at the upcoming PAF Olomouc festival in Czechia. “We did a joint performance at [Czech festival] Bučení this summer, and [the PAF performance] is going to be a movement from that towards where the album’s going to end up,” says Cajm. “That performance was a little bit more minimal, and for this one we’re going to expand, see what works.”
Cajm and Scout started working together around three years ago, when the now Glasgow-based Scout reached out to Cajm after discovering and following the prolific producer’s music online. Their first IRL encounter was in Cajm’s ‘floating studio’ in London. “I had this scaffolding structure in the middle of my room,” Cajm explains. “When [Scout] came around I’d hung all the synths and instruments and the mixer and everything from the scaffolding.” Although it was the first time they’d met, they didn’t really speak, channelling everything into two hours of music-making, what Scout describes as, “non-verbal talking about life. I just came in and was like, I need to get this stuff out. We went into the zone. I am in my element when I don’t quite know what things need to be, or things are not exactly how they need to be. So I was comfortable there, sitting on the floor, playing little keyboards in the air.” It sounds magical, I say. “You are on the magical spectrum,” Scout says to Cajm.
Although they’ve been working on their upcoming collaborative album since that first meeting, Cajm estimates that “50 per cent of it comes from those first two hours we met.” It’s also influenced the staging for the duo’s upcoming performance at PAF Olomouc, which will set up in a square to mimic the surrounds of their first meeting. “It feels like it will create that parameter again for us,” says Scout. At Bučení, she used a pedal to build up her trademark vocal loops, but for PAF, she’s thinking about how she can replicate the same sound organically. “I have to BE the loop,” she emphasises. “If I want to say something again, I have to say it again. Or make it sound like I have 10 voices at the same time. I have to really go for it. I really want to think about the flow and patterns and melodic sequences in the instrumentation, and then also within the voice.”
The duo are approaching their set at PAF as part of the process of making their album. “Sometimes there’s shows where you’re like, here is a presentation, and then there’s shows that are very much an exploration,” Scout explains. “This show is a source for generating.” They will bring their songs to the space with an open mind. “Most of the time I get the ideas when I actually enter the room,” Scout continues. As a classically trained dancer who incorporates choreography and movement into her work, she often thinks of improvisation in terms of space and action. “When you sing a song, you’re in a totally different realm. To then geographically explore that within the limitations of the space, and the audience being there, it changes so much. A lot of times it’s very much about where the audience are, what it feels like to be in the room, and what the room is calling or not calling to happen.”
Scout’s recent projects have all shared a subterranean gothic character; from the ‘dystopian karaoke’ of 2021’s Karaoke At The Slag Heap to 2023’s The Heart Of The Anchoress, recorded using the pipe organ at St. Giles’ Church in Camberwell. This upcoming record with Cajm, however, will have an ostensibly different vibe. “There’s a lot of nautical themes on the album,” says Cajm, to my surprise. What was the catalyst for this? “The quest to go see the Drinking Dragon, which I have never been to,” says Scout, referring to an uncanny rock formation off the Isle of Man. “It’s a stone island which looks like a dragon frozen in time, drinking the water from the sea. I love stones that look like creatures, and dragons were already part of my subconscious at the start of this. I honestly don’t feel like the album can be complete until we make the pilgrimage, and we see the skeleton of the dragon inside.”
How have the duo already incorporated these nautical sounds? “At Bučení we had two accordions,” says Cajm. “Have you ever been in a boatyard, and the movement of the ships sounds like groaning? The accordions sounded like that. And a foghorn is the first melodic element you hear on the album. Foghorns are beautiful – they’re really loud, but really far away; huge, but not an immediate threat, with a sound that reverberates a lot. Also, weirdly the room they suggested we play in [at PAF] kind of looks like the hull of a boat. Maybe that will influence us – we need some more groaning sounds!”
Scout and Cajm’s album is due for release in 2026. Both are working on it alongside a multitude of other projects. Scout is making new work with Coby Sey and her darkwave duo Marina Zispin, plus she has “a whole bank of music” based on Handel’s arias waiting for release. Cajm has multiple production projects and solo work on the go (“What have you got, like 42 records that you need to release?” Scout teases). After PAF, the focus is on the Drinking Dragon pilgrimage to wrap up their album together. “It could be really fun to do a mass Facebook post and be like, hey everybody, this is the trip that we’re gonna make,” suggests Scout. “Then record the sound, if everyone brought an instrument to play when we got to the dragon. I feel like we need to incorporate the recordings of the way that the water sounds with people and instruments. That to me is the next chapter, making this mission once this performance happens.”
PAF Olomouc takes place between 3 and 6 December 2025 – find out more here
