WHAT do we call it? That’s the question that is going around the table in a café on the Great Western Road in Glasgow this Thursday morning. Richard Luke, one-time indie kid and now composer and producer, and Amira Bedrush-McDonald, first violin with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, are discussing what label to put on the music they make together. Is it contemporary classical? Modern classical? Neo-classical?

“I honestly don’t really mind,” Luke says. “Some people get quite offended by modern classical and neo-classical. I saw someone had classified it as New Age.”

“I saw that as well,” Bedrush-McDonald adds. “What does that mean? Neo-classical? That was Prokofiev, Stravinsky. But that was ages ago.

“I think with any genre that’s evolving, it’s labelled properly after the fact so we will see. In America, apparently, they call in indie classical. I guess people are using the word classical meaning instrumental.”

Whatever you want to call it, Luke’s new album Glass Island is a lovely thing; a stately, melancholic, quietly gorgeous blend of piano, strings and electronics. It feels like a soundtrack to a film we just haven’t seen yet. It’s in the neighbourhood of Max Richter and the late Johann Johannsson, the go-to guys for film directors who want a contemporary gloss on the classic film score.

You could easily imagine the tracks on Glass Island playing over the next Almodóvar movie. That said, the album stands up on its own too. Bedrush-McDonald’s strings sing over a piano foundation while electronic glitches and beats add grain and texture. The result is both lush and restrained.

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This is the second album the duo has made together and is a continuation and an extension of what they did on their debut Voz. Both albums are new territory for Luke and Bedrush-McDonald.

Luke – real name Richard Webster – is from Clitheroe near Manchester. He moved to Glasgow in 2000 as a student where he formed the indie band Unkle Bob in 2006, decamping to London and a brief moment in the sun.

“The band basically broke up in 2011 and that’s when I came here,” Luke says, continuing the story. “I couldn’t afford to live in London. I could never afford to live in London actually. I moved back up in 2011.”

He’s since set up a studio and worked with various bands including Man Of Moon and James (he did programming on the band’s latest album). But Voz and Glass Island are a new direction for him. “I was a bit sick of doing the indie-man-in-a-band thing,” he admits.

He met Bedrush-McDonald through mutual friends. “I think we got really drunk one Christmas,” Luke recalls. “We ended up having a wee jam back at my place.”

Bedrush-McDonald (daughter of a Scottish mother and a half-Libyan, half-Italian father) grew up in Partick, started free violin lessons in school before going to the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. After a few years studying in Texas she returned to Scotland and freelanced with orchestras and played the odd ceilidh before getting her current job in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

After that Christmas jam, the two of them met up for a more formal recording session during which they came up with a tune, Beachcombing, that appeared on the first album. “Beachcombing went really well, and it sounded like there was a future in it, I guess,” Luke says. “I guess that spurred us on.”

They’ve been working together ever since.

Which begs the question, how? What is the mode of operation? “Rick’s normally laid down a section of chords or ideas or motifs and then I’ll try and noodle around,” explains Bedrush-McDonald. “There’s a lot of stopping and starting and me giggling and saying, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ And then, somehow, the more you persevere things start coming together.

“We’re developing a kind of lingo as well. I’m used to reading notes off the page and Rick is used to doing stuff naturally.”

“I can’t read music,” Luke admits. “Amira is incredibly well tuned. She can hear notes that might be a tiny, tiny bit flat. That I can’t even hear. But then we’ll put an electronic tune on it and she’s right.”

The electronics are a more recent development. The first album, Luke admits, is quite bare-boned. “It was important to develop the sound from Voz. I’ve always been into Arcade Fire, Jon Hopkins, Sigur Ros, that epic building thing, so I set a course for that.”

It owes a lot too, he admits, to the fact that he’s obsessed with plug-ins and technology. “Whenever anything comes out, I just try and add it in. And then,” he says, looking at Bedrush-McDonald and smiling, “you come around and say, ‘take that out’.”

It’s tempting, I say, to project the current state of our disunited kingdom onto the album title, Glass Island. “Great Britain feels like a bit of a mess right now,” Luke admits.

Maybe then Glass Island, I suggest, could be music as consolation. It is restrained, slow-building, the opposite of in you face which is the default setting for pop right now.

“I think it’s a funny time for music in general,” Luke suggests. “Even for me as a music lover, as a producer, my attention span is, I don’t know, 20 seconds. I never used to be like that. I think streaming and the way people listen has changed the way people make music. There are no long intros. It’s straight in.”

That’s not what he is doing. “I guess we’re trading in atmospheres rather than in choruses. We’ve always wanted to do a film as well.

For Bedrush-McDonald the experience of working with Luke has taken her out of her comfort zone, “recording with the microphone on just my violin rather than being part of a group [in the orchestra]. It’s throwing myself into the deep end. Initially, it was nerve-wracking, but it’s become more relaxed and I feel freer in a way. It’s not that I’ve changed how I play in an orchestra that I could really describe properly but I feel freer within the parameters of a Mozart symphony or whatever.”

For the moment, Glass Island live will be the two of them plus electronic cues. But maybe one day Bedrush-McDonald’s day job can overlap with her other musical life. Luke certainly hopes so.

“The economics of playing live means it has to be simple now, but it would be amazing to play with an orchestra. I’d love to do that.”

What do we call that? How about ambition?

Glass Island is released on Moderna Records next Friday. Richard Luke and Amira Bedrush-McDonald launch the album at the Blue Arrow Club in Glasgow on Sunday night.