folk music
Katie Colombus
Cat Power, aka singer-songwriter Chan Marshall, is releasing her first live album – a recording of the faithful recreation of Bob Dylan’s infamous gig of 1966, played in November 2022 at the Royal Albert Hall.Dylan’s transformative gig actually took place at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, but was known as the “Royal Albert Concert Hall” after a Bootleg Series typo. Halfway through the set he switched from acoustic solo guitar to electric, thus changing the course of history for folk music, which prompted “boos” and walkouts from an infuriated folk-purist audience.It’s not her first foray Read more ...
Tim Cumming
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 making an impact as a stage performer.Her most recent album, 2019’s So It Turns was a self-released set of songs inspired by her time spent at Samye Ling Tibetan Buddhist monastery, the first to be established in the west, and which features, too, in the work of the late Genesis P Orridge. Dreamer Awake, meanwhile, is her first release on Navigator Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 Lofthus. She uses the interior of a grand piano to get the necessary resonance, the echo which distant animals would hear.This evocation of an aspect of country life is part of a radical reinterpretation of Edvard Grieg’s 19 Norske Folkeviser (19 Norwegian Folk Songs), composed in 1896. The first piece in the cycle is “Kulok” (Cattle Call). With Read more ...
joe.muggs
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 influential.Along with the likes of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and Pixies’s Kim Deal, she not only reconfigured the sense of what the female voice was in rock music, but helped codify singing styles for men and women vocalists in grunge and alt-rock ever after.Later, as the Muses and her solo work evolved, she brought out more historical undercurrents Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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: he covered 700 counties using a grid system, so nothing would be missed. As well as tapes, he made lists, filled notebooks and took photos. He kept everything.After archivists at the National Museum of American History went through what was donated by McCormick’s daughter to the Smithsonian Institution in 2019, they found his collection encompassed Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
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 was, however, too early for the folk micro-boom engendered by Mumford & Sons, and his songs weren’t whiney enough for mass 21st century tastes in singer-songwriters. He’s consistently been making music, though, and his latest proves the fires are far from out.Seven years ago, Joseph focused his attention on a new project, William The Conqueror, Read more ...
Liz Thomson
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 classic early Sixties’ albums.By the time she recorded Wildflowers in 1967, Collins had already become the woman whom Stephen Stills would immortalise in song (“Chestnut-brown canary/ Ruby-throated sparrow/ Sing a song, don’t be long/Thrill me to the marrow”). Stills would play on her 1968 album, Who Knows Where the Time Goes, the title song of which put Read more ...
Tim Cumming
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 a break in that arrow opening up near its tip.It’s an absorbent and contemplative representation of forces rarely seen and beyond our control, and there’s a strong golden thread of the contemplative and of forces from beyond embedded in the album’s music, and its sacred edge.Peter Culshaw is one of the founders of this website, and a veteran and Read more ...
joe.muggs
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 seventh in the 28 years since she first appeared with the space-dub-country-torch-song trio One Dove. And it was a delicate album, built on generations of the purest psychedelic folk, a perfect soundtrack for emerging from the shock of peak COVID, full of the intimacy of isolation and fears for the world, but renewed love of nature. Consciousology Read more ...
Tim Cumming
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 plenty of folk rock – often all at the same time – and he’s long had a knack for a memorably catchy hook and for encapsulating a narrative in a handful of verses, as much on classics like the Mercury nominated “Kitty Jay” as on this album's opener, “The Giant”. He’s recently been seen supporting Van Morrison on The Man’s superb Moving On Skiffle set Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
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 the album, the second closes it. Between, amongst the original compositions, there is also an adaptation of Tim Buckley’s “I Must Have Been Blind.”Taking these as a way in to the fourth studio album from the UK-born but Irish singer-songwriter Brigid Mae Power is an understandable path to follow, but after Dream From The Deep Well concludes it Read more ...
Tim Cumming
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 for $25, and allowed fifty minutes, 13 songs, and the chance to revisit over the following 48 hours. Then Alma H’arel’s film evaporated into the digital ether, its noir-ish settings turning dark, apparently never to return.Two years on, and while the film itself remains for now in the dark room, the soundtrack is manifesting in traditional physical Read more ...