folk music
Album: Rachel Sermanni - Dreamer AwakeTuesday, 19 September 2023
It was more than a decade ago when I first saw Rachel Sermanni in concert, in the upstairs room at The Old Queen’s Head in Islington, London, for a Nest Collective night. She had yet to release her debut, 2012’s Under Mountains, but was already... Read more... |
Hardanger Musikkfest 2023 review - fertility, folk music and the supernatural unite along Norway’s fjordsThursday, 07 September 2023
The cows are scattered across the mountains. Without scrambling up the slopes, the only way to summon them is to call. Unni Løvlid is beckoning them. Instead of standing outdoors she is in the medieval Ullensvang Church, in the Norwegian village of... Read more... |
Album: Kristin Hersh - Clear Pond RoadWednesday, 06 September 2023
Kristin Hersh’s voice, it transpires, is ageless. In the 80s when Throwing Muses broke through, she hit a particular combination of tones – blurring boundaries between harsh and smooth, melodic and discordant, trad and weird – that became vastly... Read more... |
Music Reissues Weekly: Playing for the Man at the Door - Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormickSunday, 13 August 2023
Between the late 1950s and around 1971, Robert “Mack” McCormick (1930–2015) travelled through his base-state Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, west Louisiana and parts of Arkansas and Oklahoma looking for musicians to record. It wasn’t a random process:... Read more... |
Album: William The Conqueror - Excuse Me While I VanishThursday, 03 August 2023
Ruarri Joseph is not a household name but in a Sliding Doors scenario, he might have been. Scottish, raised in New Zealand, and based in Cornwall, he signed to Atlantic in 2007, and had the same management as Damien Rice and David Gray. His output... Read more... |
Judy Collins, Cambridge Folk Festival review - celebrating a seminal Sixties' albumMonday, 31 July 2023
It’s 15 years since Judy Collins last stepped out at the Cambridge Folk Festival. She was a mere 68 then and, in the time since, little has changed except her hair, the famous rock-star mane lopped so that she now resembles the cover of those... Read more... |
Album: Peter Culshaw - Music from the Temple of LightSaturday, 29 July 2023
Music from the Temple of Light has for its cover image a minimalist 17th century representation of Tantra. In this instance, a deep blue field bordering on black, scored by a golden yellow square, an arrow hanging down from the square’s centre, and... Read more... |
Album: Dot Allison - ConsciousologyThursday, 27 July 2023
This album promises to be an expansion of the sound and ideas of its 2021 predecessor Heart Shaped Scars, and boy does it deliver. HSS was the Scottish singer-songwriter Dot Allison’s first album in some nine years, and only her... Read more... |
Album: Seth Lakeman - The Somerset SessionsSaturday, 01 July 2023
Dartmoor-born folk star Seth Lakeman has an illustrious album catalogue behind him, and this is the general release of a limited-edition vinyl released earlier this year for Record Store Day.Lakeman’s songs embrace traditional folk, pop music and... Read more... |
Album: Brigid Mae Power - Dream From The Deep WellSaturday, 24 June 2023
The cover versions on Dream From The Deep Well include “I Know Who is Sick,” most familiar from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Maken interpretation, and “Down by the Glenside,” which The Dubliners incorporated into their repertoire. The first opens... Read more... |
Album: Bob Dylan - Shadow KingdomSaturday, 27 May 2023
Dylan’s Shadow Kingdom first crossed our paths in July 2021, his first streaming event, and coming little more than a year after the garden of unearthly delights that was Rough and Rowdy Ways. To enter this kingdom, you were given a key code... Read more... |
Album: Shirley Collins - Archangel HillFriday, 26 May 2023
Mount Caburn is east of Lewes in Sussex. Shirley Collins’s stepfather used to call it Archangel Hill. The site of an Iron Age hill fort, it was defended with a ditch during the Roman and Saxon periods. In World War II, a gun emplacement was... Read more... |
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