folk track
Track: Cornish singer Billie Flynn debuts with the wistful, breathy folk-pop of ‘Hey Stranger’
LIVING among the gnarly granite and crashing waves of Cornwall’s rugged north coast is no bad thing for creative inspiration and evocation; as debuting Cornish singer Billie Flynn knows, as she unveils the hushed folk mystery of “Hey Stranger” Billie has just signed with Gabrielle Aplin’s Never Fade imprint and this first drop is, I …
With his debut solo album just a fortnight away, Cameron Knowler invites us to contemplation in ‘Kuyina’
WITH HIS two-hander album with Eli Winter, Anticipation, an excellent study in guitar primitivism, just three months behind us in the rear-view mirror, Texas acoustic explorer is just a fortnight or so away from the release of his debut album proper, Places Of Consequence – a study of roots, memory and the land in the …
Track: Happy Axe spins gossamer chamber-folk delight with ‘One Morning’ – there’s even a musical saw
HAPPY AXE is the gossamer-delicate, intimately confessional dream-folk project of Canberra-born, Melbourne-based Emma Kelly, who’ll be releasing her second album, Maybe It’ll Be Beautiful, early in July. And she’s been kind enough to share a delicate gem from that, her second album; “One Morning” is whispery with reverb, processes through the secret garden on fragile …
Track: Thallo’s ‘Pressed And Preserved’ is a chamber-folk lovely, warmed with woodwind
WITH acclaim for her last single, the elemental, soul-in-free-flight expressive “The Water”, garnering attention from across the board, earning playlisting on both Radio 1 and Radio 6 Music, Welsh chamber-folk singer Thallo has returned to maze us further with a new single, “Pressed And Preserved”. Rich with woodwind a gathered company of acoustic nuance, it …
See: Emma Houton – ‘Bow & Balance’: a Scots murder ballad reframed as soaring ambient folk
EMMA HOUTON, the ambient-folk artist based in New York who draws on the traditional songs we’re all surrounded by and those of her Irish ancestry, has released the video for a second track to be taken from her forthcoming debut album, The Bath. It’s her plaintive, bold reworking of the traditional murder ballad “Bow And …
Track: Alexa Rose – ‘Clearwater Park’: those endless childhood summers evoked in rootsy folk magic
WITH a third album of heartfelt, bell-clear folk songcraft due out in the autumn on Fat Possum’s Big Legal Mess imprint, Black Mountain, North Carolina-based Alexa Rose has released a sweet and ethereal evocation of those endless days of childhood summer, the sun hot and high, the evenings endless, the sense of expectancy and joy …
Rachel Sermanni – ‘Travelled’: Scottish folk troubadour bares all and announces winter tour
WITH her new EP, Swallow Me, due out in the first days of June – an EP which lays bare with delicacy and courage her living through the arrival of her firstborn in a hugely uncertain world, with all the forethought and adaptations that brings – Rachel Sermanni has revealed the video for “Travelled”, the …
See: Rachel Sermanni – ‘Swallow Me’: graceful, spiritual and lighter than air, it’s the title track from her June EP
BRINGING new life into the world and fresh hope for a budding spring, Strathspey folkie Rachel Sermanni is all set to drop her first EP in what feels like too long, actually, too long; and she’s throwing up the windows on that forthcoming release with the bell-clear offering to the fates of “Swallow Me”, which …
Track: heka signs to Balloon Machine and drops the smokey noir of ‘(a) wall’
A MULTIDISCIPLINARY artist by trade and by vocation, comfortable in any number of mediums, Heka is the sonic alias of Francesca Brierley, who’s just signed to the excellent Manchester-based independent Balloon Machine, home already to the breathtaking folk stylings of Laura Fell. Her debut EP for the zine-turned-label is succinctly titled (a) and will be …
Track: Little Arrow – ‘Poetically Diseased’ (Live at Four Bars, Cardiff, 2014): potent live take heralds the tenth anniversary rerelease of ‘Music, Masks & Poems’
HAILING from far out west in deepest Pembrokeshire, Little Arrow began making waves on the Welsh scene a decade back with a fully musically and emotionally realised debut album, Music, Masks & Poems. Tragically, Little Arrow’s frontman William Hughes died of cancer in December 2018, cutting short the career of a band with real depth …