Guitarist Louis Campbell and fiddle player Owen Spafford started playing together as teenagers in the National Youth Folk Ensemble when Sam Sweeney (of Bellowhead and Leveret) was its director. They released their first album, You Golden, three years ago. It featured audacious musical extrapolations from Playford’s English Dance Master – also a key source for Sweeney’s Leveret – and with an emphasis on ensuring an abundance space, rather than notes, in the playing.
Since then they’ve mounted multi-media solo shows – Spafford’s music and art installation Welcome Here, Kind Stranger at the Royal Academy of Music, and his Here Comes I folk opera about the Christmas Mummers play, while Campbell’s elegant, tasty guitar work has featured in shows with Sam Sweeney and Sam Lee, as well as 2023’s star-studded Bert Jansch 80th birthday celebrations.
Now signed to Real World Records, they put out an EP earlier this year, 102 Metres East, featuring three new tracks, including a striking and charming take on “Pop Goes the Weasel”. With their second album, Tomorrow Held, they expand that sense of space in their music to cosmic dimensions, especially on the centrepiece, 14-minute title track, but also on the pensive march of “Will”, and opening track “Cooper”, that seems to form between your ears from next-to-nothingness, a mini universal expansion in sound, string-scrapes forming into primordial figures constellating across a semi-controlled space that gradually takes on shifting melodic forms.
It’s very "inner" but epic and out there too. It can feel like the music is playing them at times – a testament to how good they are in musically responding to where the other is heading. Likewise, “26” (perhaps referencing their ages?) eases into existence as lightly as a river mist, dusky and with a percussive heartbeat hidden somewhere deep inside it, Ben Nicholl’s double bass rising up half way in, and with an almost subliminal wash of Alex Lyon’s bass clarinet.
Tomorrow Held’s soundscape also interrogates the possibilities of dissonance, from the glitchy beats and wordless vocals from Louis Campbell on “All Your Tiny Bones” to through the heavily fuzzed electric guitar on both “Look Up” and the short, sharp album closer, “Four”, and the title track that holds and raises the set high.
Altogether, it’s an absorbing, complex, cosmic open field of instrumental invention, collaboration, inspiration, initiation, simultaneously getting right to the point and going off reservation. This is music that takes you to new places, far out and all the way in. They’re touring the UK through October, and if you want to witness some of the best contemporary folk music being made right now, you’ll not want miss out.
- Tomorrow Held is on Real World Records
- More New Music reviews on theartsdesk
- Tim Cumming's website
