The Man behind Pictish Trail

Since his musical inception in 2002, Johnny Lynch A.K.A Pictish Trail has derived and driven his own unique path, gingerly engineering his own style of originality, colour, and personifying the highland hues in which he grew. Lynch dwells across the green in the Isle of Eigg, yet holds enormous capability for bestowing and capturing nature’s wonders in his heart and within the scenes of electro-acoustic psych-pop.

Pictish Trail is an expressionistic act. Grasping a somewhat strange and astonishingly acerbic tone, Lynch’s sounds are a formulated and translatable message of entropy. His music is relatable yet unpredictable and deeply personal. Listeners have seen symmetrical traces of Beck, The Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, and Fever Ray in the guises of his sounds. Intriguing and ascending the boundaries of linguistic and physical familiarity, a discovery for the euphoric in the bucolic, Pictish Trail will be standing with us on June 3rd, with fellow artists Hot Chip.

A year after his music initiation, Lynch has actively attended and performed at every Green Man Festival, and orchestrated many recordings that differentiate him from conventional music. His phonic pictures are plenty and his eclectic catalogue chants creation. His moniker Pictish Trail was first born when recording his first album on his computer, dropping it into the ether with Fence Records in 2003. Lynch was the executive of Fence Records until 10 years dawned in 2013. Following this signature, Lynch signed and formed his own collective, Lost Map Records. Here, he celebrates and calibrates sensational and diverse mixtures of mood and elevation, representing artists such as Bas Ja, Callum Easter, Free Love, Rozi Plain, and Seamus Fogarty. His first two albums Secret Sounds Vol.1 in 2008 and Secret Sounds Vol. 2 in 2012 were both critically acclaimed and were an intimate incite into the world of lo-fi folk-pop and alternative indie-psychedelic sounds. His third album Future Echoes in 2016 is an odyssey through time and features experimental pieces touching upon themes of existence and the absurdity of being. Singles such as “Far Gone”, “After Life”, and “Dead Connection” encompass effervescent beauty and have had far and wide-reaching approval. Following the release of the collection, Lynch and Lost Map’s Tuff Love toured widely together along with Malcolm Middleton on instrumentals. Future Echoes was also shortlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year Award. Thumb World, Pictish’s 2020 piece, and his fourth LP is arguably his most inventive and satirical collection yet. Described by Clash as “his most dazzling, most exceptional [piece]”, Junction 1 is seriously looking forward to the mysteries and nonplus touches of Lynch’s DIY-till-I-die attitude to music and performance. As he puts it, the album is a plugged-in, fuzzed-out, fucked-up contemplation on “life repeating and gradually degrading, the inevitable cyclical nature of things, and the sense of there ultimately being no escape.”

Pictish Trail is a wondrous solo journey, yet Johnny Lynch is also part of a wider network of musicians that he continues to push and provide for. He is the fulcrum and front-runner of the British independent music community and through his self-sustained and homespun label Lost Map Records, diversity and peculiarity emerge and flourish within his community and radiate through every single performance. It Came Back, Pictish Trail’s 2022 release is comprised of meadow-like and nature enshrined oscillations and is a metaphoric and underlying quotation of Lynch’s personal story in the northern arcadia of Scottish nature.

From the foothills of the north, Pictish Trail will be performing some of the best tracks of his acclaimed legacy at Junction 1 this summer. Representing so much that resounds and resonates with both nature and culture, this is a performance that will change your consciousness and catapult you into a fruitful oblivion of equanimity and concord with all.

Discover and experience Pictish Trail this summer by visiting our Tickets Page.