Kathryn Joseph and Lomond Campbell on bringing their musical collaboration to the Edinburgh festivals

Joseph and Campbell have two joint appearances this August. On 9 August the wizard joins the witch for Up Late with Kathryn Joseph at the EIF. In return, the witch will join the wizard on 3 August as one of his special guests for MŮO Live, part of the Fringe’s Made in Scotland showcase.

What will this involve? “I’m going to dance, I’ve decided. Interpretive dance, naked,” says the witch with a cackle, playing up to the image. She turns to the wizard. “Am I playing and singing as well?” “Yes you f***ing are,” responds Campbell. “What am I paying you for?” “Yeah,” confirms Joseph. “I’ll dance naked, and sing, and play, ok?”

Off stage, the witch and the wizard are more like bickering siblings; Joseph calls Campbell “my creepy brother who is really horrible to me but is also really funny so he gets away with it”. It begins even as we arrange the interview. “As long as Kathryn doesn’t go on and on about winning the SAY Award I’m sure we can be done in an hour,” Campbell emails to me, copying in Joseph. “Haaaaaaaa it’s all I have,” she responds. “How dare you try and stop me.”

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The pair first worked together on Joseph’s 2022 album, For You Who Are The Wronged, but there were several brief encounters long before then. They first met in Aberdeeen in their twenties when Campbell was Joseph’s sound engineer at an early gig in Dr Drake’s.

“I said to Kathryn something like, ‘I'm not a real sound man.’ And she went, ‘but you look real to me’, or something weird like that. And then she was just as she is now; very gracious and thankful and everybody was quite captivated by it all.” Their paths crossed again at a festival in Iona when, as Joseph describes it, “I didn’t go to your gig and you were really pissed off. I didn't realise. I didn't feel like I knew him that well for it to be a problem. And then I weirdly took a picture of him, through the porthole of the boat, that I found on my phone ten years later.”

Campbell: “She didn't want to come and see me live but she was happy to creepily take photos of me, unbeknownst to me.”

Joseph: “I put it on a little shrine with incense to manifest him working with me, yeah. I had to do poisonous magic to make it make sense.”

The first manifestation was recorded, at Joseph’s request, at Campbell’s studio in the Highlands. For You Who Are The Wronged kickstarted a productive creative relationship, its sparse, minimal atmospherics evolving, via a 2024 remix EP, into the fierce, claustrophobic electronica of Joseph’s 2025 album We Were Made Prey. The duo are performing these songs together for much of this year, including a European tour with Mogwai in the autumn.

We Were Made Prey was, remarkably, recorded more or less from scratch in one week, at Black Bay Studio in the Isle of Lewis. “I recorded this record in one day,” clarifies Joseph, modestly, “and then Ziggy did everything else.” This isn’t quite true. While the wizard is prone to poking fun at the witch’s inexpert attempts at percussion, Joseph is also credited as a co-producer. “Her ideas for production are amazing,” he acknowledges. “Oh, thanks,” Joseph responds. “You've never been nice to me before. Please write that.” “I'm just doing it in front of Andrew, okay,” shoots back Campbell. “Just trying to be professional. Your managers told me to behave.”

Still, if you’re a Kathryn Joseph fan looking for insight into the wizard’s contribution to the witch’s spells, you should check out MŮO, on show for most of the month as an installation in addition to nine limited capacity live performances. The project began with an invitation from the University of Glasgow. As Campbell tells it, “They said, I don't suppose you’d be interested in making one of your music machines using our muon detectors that can detect harmless radiation in the atmosphere that comes from massive nuclear events in space. And obviously, I am the absolute person to send that email to and I was pretty excited about it.”

With Made in Scotland support, a technical challenge evolved into something more public-facing and “a little bit more immersive”. When we speak, the wizard is still fine-tuning. “With these machines, they've always got a behaviour. It's like you have to learn how to collaborate with them. So I've still got to learn how the machine behaves and how it wants to make music, and write probably about 45 to 50 minutes’ worth of music for the show, and then a generative installation version as well that will run sort of at the same time as the performances. And I’ve got some special guests.” Still under wraps at the time of our interview, these turn out to be King Creosote (on 5 August) and Kathryn Joseph (3 August).

Which brings us back to the witch. “Did you see his Instagram reveal, Andrew, see how obvious it was, how cruel a drawing?” says Joseph, referring to a sketch Campbell posted online a few weeks ago, teasing MŮO’s mystery guests. “I’ll find it, I’ve got my diary here,” says Campbell gleefully and shows me what is clearly a caricature of Joseph’s face. “I hate you,” says Joseph. “All of my paranoia is there in that drawing.” “Oh come on now, it’s flattering,” grins the wizard, as the witch looks like she wants to put a hex on him.

Up Late with Kathryn Joseph is at The Hub, 9 August. www.eif.co.uk. MŮO is at the French Institute, 8-25 August with limited live performances from 1 August including a guest appearance by Kathryn Joseph on 3 August. www.madeinscotlandshowcase.com