'THE CRICHTON' AVAILABLE TO STREAM NOW
About
With a background in traditional music, covid-19 restrictions forced Dumfries born guitarist Jenna Macrory (Jen Mac) to adapt to a completely new music industry. Finding a new focus as an electronic music producer, Jen Mac uses sampling to obtain gritty textures and while drawing attention to social and cultural issues such as environmental and LGBTQ+ issues. Jen Mac’s unique approach to manipulating sampled materials contributes to her unique genre subverting tone.
JEN MAC CREATIVE CV
Projects & Commisions
Summer 2020 - Current
Guided by Environment
Guided by Environment, Jen Mac's longstanding sound and art project, experiments at the confluence of Nature. Using found sounds collected from wild and rural ecosystems in Dumfries and Galloway, Jen Mac creates genre subverting electronic sets. These warped sounds are then re-presented back into their original landscapes as a means of encouraging participants to reconsider how they interact with wild spaces.
Spring 2023 - Current
Yabba
As a member of up and coming band Yabba I have been working as a guitarist in this band in a studio and live capacity. Crafting an unmistakably original sound Yabba are a regular feature in many notable venues with 2023 shows booked across the UK.
Autumn 2021
Sanctuary Lab 2021: Spoor - Guided by Environment
Sanctuary is a unique site-specific public art event that explores what happens when environment, art, technology, science and culture meet. Sanctuary creates an experimental space for new work ranging from performance and interactive installations to sound works, video projections and radio transmissions. For the 2021 instalment a new series of songs were composed from the surrounding site. Using field recordings that hint at the texture of the landscape, the captured sounds will be recycled to make a unique set of tracks which will then be played intimately to the listener through wireless headphones. Through this listening experience, participants are invited to question where the manipulated sounds were originally derived from. As a result of this, an initial dialogue is instigated around environmental aesthetics and how humans interact with nature. Do we experience the environment as something for us to inhabit or are we part of the environment we exist in?
Spring - Summer 2018 (Trainee) 2021 - 2023 (Tutor)
The Sound System Project
Sound System Scotland focusses on engaging youth through workshops where the participants, over a number of weeks, build a sound system which the community can keep after the project. Alongside building the sound system, participants had the opportunity to learn DJing, songwriting and music production providing many of these young people with a creative outlet they may struggle to find outside of this space.
Summer 2020 - Spring 2021
LGBTQ Voices
A comission as part of the wider art project Atlas Pandemica, LGBTQ Voices hosted conversation around LGBTQ identity in a rural setting, specifically Dumfries and Galloway. Inspired by viewing hate speech as the start of a dusfunctional conversation, this project involved highlighting issues faced by the LGBTQ community through a series of provocations. Utilising digital spheres to host the provocations, the responses were then collated before exploring issues in further depth through podcast. Drawing the project to a close, the responses recieved from the community were represented in a map which featured both positive stories from the LGBTQ+ community and hate speech received in the community. The purpose of this map is to highlight the issue of discrimination in our local community.
2016 - 2018 blueprint100 (Trainee), 2020 - 2022 Creative Spaces (Project Lead)
Creative Spaces
Offering both paid and voluntary opportunities for the under 30’s, Creative Spaces facilitate an annual programme of events and workshops designed to help you find your voice, explore and develop your artistic practice. Initially joining an earlier reincarnation of the project (blueprint100) as an emerging artist, I gradually progressed to project lead in 2021. From here Creative Spaces became the central element of my freelance practice overseeing multiple parts of this project including partnership, recruitment and facilitation.
Summer 2021
Dumfries Fountain Restoration Project (Composer Commission)
Working collaboratively with film maker Patrick Rooney, this commission entailed creating the soundtrack to a film documenting the restoration of the fountain in the centre of Dumfries. Liaising with Patrick to make a collection of tracks that worked alongside this short film the majority of the tracks were created from found sound that related to the fountain itself.
Summer 2020
Nithraid Song Commission
Dumfries' annual Nithraid event celebrates the river Nith, the river that separates the two halves of the town. For the 2020 edition of Nithraid I was asked to create two songs that could be showcased at this event. Using found sound from the river for one track I created a dance type beat while the other track sampled archived footage from Dumfries flooding in the 1930s.
2016 - 2018 Stage Manager & Event Logistics
Nithraid
Upon leaving school I was fortunate enough to obtain a position as ‘Trainee Event Producer’ for Nithraid. Hosted by the Dumfries based arts network, The Stove Network, Nithraid is an annual festival celebrating the river which runs
through the town. This position entailed working with numerous teams in order to co-ordinate
an event encapsulating a number of elements while running as efficiently as possible. This entry position allowed me to gain experience in marketing, permissions and funding however my main responsibility entailed programming and running the music stage for the festival.