WHEN Martin Green set about making a multi-media art piece based around the theme of immigration, he didn’t have to stray far from home for inspiration.

The musician’s family were Jewish refugees who fled Austria in the 1930s. After sitting down with his grandmother to hear tales of her life, initially intended as nothing more than documentation for his children, Green realised he had a stirring and powerful human story on his hands.

“I had heard the stories before, and you always pick up some as a child, but when I spoke to her face-to-face it was a whole different thing,” says Green, who also plays in experimental folk trio Lau. “The emotion comes through in a very different way, and conversations end up leading down new avenues.”

Green’s grandmother left Austria to travel to London with her mother, where his great-grandfather also ended up (after a spell in Shanghai). “He fell back into my great granny’s arms,” Green said in another interview. This unlikely romantic story formed the basis of Roll Away, a moving song on the new Flit album.

Green soon became fascinated by the idea of talking to immigrants and portraying their stories through music: “It’s a little bit like when you learn a new word and you start to see it everywhere; once you’re open to it, interesting stories pop up everywhere.”

He adds: “I live close to Edinburgh, so we have a lot of international citizens around. Some I met in pubs, some people I already knew, and there was a woman who married a Ghanean guy, for instance. One of the mums from the kids’ club was an Iranian woman.” The musician says he took the facts of these tales, like “time and place”, out of the songs to give them a more universal appeal.

The record and the live touring show feature members of Portishead (Adrian Utley), Mogwai (Dominic Aitchison) and The Unthanks (Becky Unthank), as well as songwriters Karine Polwart, Aidan Moffat and Anaïs Mitchell. White Robot is the company behind the 3D projections that complement the stage show, with images portrayed on to the surfaces around the musicians.

“Because of the sort of musicians I’m drawn to, it is quite dark music,” he says. “The individuals involved are all pretty dark bands at times. I would be lying if I said there were a lot of good-time numbers.”

It took a while to successfully marry Becky Unthanks’s folk vocal with Adrian Utley’s brooding electronic beats, but Green is happy with the end product. Live, the group perform amid a backdrop of mounds of thin packing paper – a metaphor for the fragile, transient situation of migrants. Despite the aforementioned darkness of Flit’s music, Green is keen to point out the positive aspects of immigration as a concept.

“Most of our association right now with immigration is negative,” he says. “Even people who are sympathetic have got into a mindset of viewing it as a problem rather than a natural phenomenon.

People are looking at the most compassionate way to solve a problem rather than accepting that people will move around the world. Those people that leave one country to go to another to be with their loved one, for instance – that’s positive”.

Green is a “small example” of this, having moved from England to Scotland to be with his wife. “I genuinely believe society is stronger through diversity, and that can get overlooked when you get hammered with statistics”.

On the week that the last refugees moved out of the Calais jungle, the project is of course highly relevant. Yet how can the average viewer – and the artists themselves – possibly empathise with people that have endured such struggle and upheaval?

“I can’t claim to empathise with my grandmother’s story,” says Green. “I think I was receptive as I could have been, but you can’t really empathise. It has been great to contemplate this matter in depth, though.”

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