KLOF Mag Regular - New Mixtape, Reviews & More

New KLOF Mixtape + Seckou Keita, Agalisaga “Chuj” Mackey, Shovel Dance Collective, Stick in the Wheel, Jake Blanchard, The Wilderness Yet, Folklore Tapes and more.

Oct 11, 2024

The past meets the future in our latest KLOF Mixtape, opening with The Standing Stones new single ‘Twa Brothers‘, on which Jem Finer’s hurdy-gurdy shredding and Alasdair Roberts’ vocals are combined to great effect by Jimmy Cauty’s (KLF) mashup production style to create a hyper-quantised dystopio-folk-horror soundscape, blurring the temporal zones of the songs’ ancient origins with the near future.

Also featuring Stick in the Wheel, Jake Blanchard, Seckou Keita, Flaer, SO SNER, Shovel Dance Collective, Jack Rose, Rónán Ó Snodaigh and Myles O’Reilly, Sally Anne Morgan, Resonant Bodies and more.

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Artist of the Month: Seckou Keita

Senegalese kora player Seckou Keita is our Artist of the Month for October. We have an interview coming next week but, in the meantime, you can read Glenn Kimpton’s insightful album review for Homeland (Chapter 1) here.

“The character of the sound is very different to the work Seckou does with Catrin Finch, for example, but the spirit of the kora is present throughout, and the whole album is impeccably produced, with a very generous booklet included with physical copies. It’s clear from this wonderful first chapter that Seckou is here to take us on a musical journey and it’s one I would urge you to join. Music this joyous and full of pathos is irresistible.”

Homeland (Chapter 1) – 18th October 2024 – Hudson Records

Pre-Order: https://hudsonrecords.ffm.to/homeland

Review/Interview: Agalisiga – Nasgino Inage Nidayulenvi

Devon Léger catches up with Oklahoma Cherokee singer and songwriter Agalisaga “Chuj” Mackey and also reviews his new album, Nasgino Inagei Nidayulenvi (It Started in the Woods), coming October 18, 2024, on Oklahoma record label Horton Records.

Extract: For Chuj, the songs on his new album were actually easier to write in Cherokee than in English. Since Cherokee is a tonal language, it lends itself well to songwriting, “you sing your words,” he says. Plus, as Chuj points out, Cherokee is a remarkably adaptive language, letting songwriters write out an entire sentence in English as one long rhyming word in Cherokee. With a rock-solid country backing on the new album, the beauty of the almost lost Cherokee language shines through in Chuj’s humble singing. His voice is weathered in Cherokee, a soft burr behind his words reminiscent of a midwest accent, but in another tongue. And though he had two grandparents who spoke fluent Cherokee and a father who was an activist for the culture, Chuj has still had to work hard to build up his language skills. He currently teaches Cherokee language and culture to kids in his hometown in Oklahoma, and his goal with the album is to inspire other Cherokee language speakers to use this ancient and beautiful living language in their everyday lives.

Read the review and interview here.

Editor’s Choice: Album Reviews

Click on the title to read the full review.

Jake Blanchard – Fermentation

Melodies like these might be a gift of the composer, but they’re also a gift from nature. Despite his personal struggles, Blanchard has made a union with the divine here, or music for those who don’t accept silence as the ultimate spiritual answer. It’s an album with the whomp of Elkhorn and the godliness of Tuluum Shimmering. Think of sound waves being dosed out to herbal plants. Think also Pat Metheney, Alice Coltrane, Shakti with John McLaughlin, Mind Over Mirrors and Banco De Gaia. Fermentation says much about the human condition and the strangeness flowing from within or without us. Close your eyes and drown in its wyrd bliss.

Shovel Dance Collective – The Shovel Dance

Any album that approaches traditional music in an experimental way will be seen to be posing a question, and that question is, more often than not: What is folk music? Uniquely, the Shovel Dance Collective seem to have moved beyond the realm of boundary and definition into an inclusive, free-flowing, collaborational space where anything is permissible and where the meaning of a word or a phrase matters less than the creative processes that occur when two or six or nine people get together for the purpose of sharing ideas. For them, the question is not: What is folk music? but: How can we make it better?

This free-flowing spirit was captured perfectly on their 2022 debut, The Water is the Shovel of the Shore, a sprawling, four-movement opus with the River Thames at its conceptual heart. The nine members (along with their twenty-five different instruments) have reconvened to make The Shovel Dance, an album less conceptual but every bit as experimental and even more politically relevant than its predecessor.

Blake Hornsby – A Village of Many Springs

But the real pièce de résistance must be the final song, Bury My Soul in the Linville River, an evening raga apparently based on an Indian piece called Yaman that spans a whole side of the cassette release. Here, Blake brings in accompaniments in the shape of tabla, electric violin and shruti box, with him playing guitar and tamboura. The violin, provided by Sam Fanthorpe, is overlaid and joins Gaia Lawing’s shruti to create a lovely soothing drone in the background. Nearly halfway in, Jonathon Sale’s tabla kicks in to change the shape of the raga, giving it a more persistent rhythm that the violin steps up to join and the guitar gamely stays with. Blake’s guitar heads into more bananas territory in the last third, enjoying a more free and improvised-sounding approach before some tweaked vocals up the weird levels near the end.

I.H/Human Hand – Ceremonial County Series Vol.VIII – Cambridgeshire | London

The latest Folklore Tapes Ceremonial Counties covers Cambridgeshire and London, with Ian Humberstone and Human Hand providing one of the most exciting and challenging instalments yet.

Strangeness grows in strange ways. It percolates through geography and topography and history via unexpected routes. The Gog Magog Hills in Cambridgeshire occupy a hinterland between the strange and the mundane. A ridge of low and unassuming chalk hills to the south of Cambridge, their name suggests the influence of the folkloric giant, Gogmagog, discussed in 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth. More recently, an entertaining piece of pseudohistory (Where Troy Once Stood, by Iman Jacob Wilkens, 1990) claimed the hills as the site of the ancient city of Troy.

The psychic centre of Gog Magog is Wandlebury Hill, home to an Iron Age ring fort and a whole host of legends. Musician, writer and ethnographer Ian Humberstone – here going by the name I.H – spent part of his youth exploring the slopes, and on the eighth volume of the Ceremonial Counties series, he gets the chance to revisit one of the weirdest and most enduring stories of the area, the myth of a ghostly warrior, the Goblin Knight of Wandlebury, who offers a duel or jousting contest to anyone who dares set foot within the perimeter of the hill fort after dark.

Amythyst Kiah – Still + Bright

Tennessee native Amythyst Kiah has cited Tori Amos, sci-fi movies and video games as style influences. More mystery was found in her early cover versions, where she tackled the likes of Radiohead, Son House and Planxty. There’s also been the matters of coming out as gay and her mother’s suicide to contend with. Now for Still + Bright she’s brought producer Butch Walker on board, famed for his work with Weezer, Avril Lavigne and Green Day. Walker is a noted fan of 1970s glam rock, but the deal pays off here, lending Kiah’s folk-soul songs an edge of slam and stomp, not unlike those of Brittany Howard.

Kiah earned a GRAMMY for her punchy anthem Black Myself, which in a saner world would be as ubiquitous as Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car. On this new material her iron-willed music is full of immortal longings, her strident voice radiating warmth and magick. At times she sounds like a sensual figure going on epic quests, with groove-steeped melodies big enough to span oceans.

Niwel Tsumbu – Milimo

This is a very interesting one. Niwel Tsumbu is a nylon string guitar maestro who hails from the Democratic Republic of Congo but relocated to Ireland in 2004. He has performed with the Buena Vista Social Club and Nigel Kennedy across the years and is part of Rhiannon Giddens’ touring band, having also contributed to her 2021 Grammy Award-winning album They’re Calling Me Home, with Francesco Turrisi. Milimo is Niwel’s first solo album, a wonderful collection of thirteen short tracks, twelve being original solo nylon string guitar instrumentals and one a traditional vocal track.

Niwel Tsumbu is a hell of an accomplished player. Throughout Milimo, his tunes sound complex yet are impeccably performed; each song feels like a polished gem, with nothing superfluous or surplus to requirements. What a lovely thing this album is.

Stick in the Wheel – A Thousand Pokes

Stick in the Wheel’s Ian Carter and Nicola Kearey do folk music a little bit differently to anyone else. Where in the past, there have been arguments about the relative merits of conserving folk traditions and modernising the genre, the duo go several steps beyond that debate. They recognise that the act of making folk music has ethical and political connotations and that collecting and conserving songs often reinforces stereotypes and strengthens unequal social structures. As a result, their music has always tilted at a forceful, thrilling kind of modernism, something rooted in their own London locality but whose message is entirely universal. Their songs ring with the joy of specificity and detail, the ferocious joy of marginalised voices making themselves heard, the angry joy of people reclaiming their heritage.

Martin Kirkegaard & Mikkel Almholt – Molacg (part 1 & 2)

Danish guitar improviser Martin Kirkegaard teams up with pianist Mikkel Almolt for ‘Molacg (part 1 & 2)’, a double LP of sharply focused improvised instrumental sound. A fascinating and essential release.

Devarrow – Heart Shaped Rock

Devarrow says his mission is “to make music that feels really good.” With Heart Shaped Rock, an album that explores themes of love, loss, self-discovery, and social consciousness, I’d say the mission is accomplished.

The Wilderness Yet – Westlin Winds

With ‘Westlin Winds’, The Wilderness Yet have surpassed even their own extremely high standards by giving the acapella aspect of their work the time and space to breathe and flourish. They’ve produced an album that melds tradition and originality into an iridescent vocal soundscape.

Thorpe & Morrison – Grass & Granite

Taking in traditional English, Scottish and Irish tunes as well as self-penned material, Thorpe & Morrison’s “Grass & Granite” is a glowing testament to their musicianship and virtuosity drawing on themes that explore both longings for home and moving on to new experiences.

Ava Mendoza – The Circular Train

Ava Mendoza is a virtuosic electric guitar player out of Brooklyn, best known for her work as part of the Bill Orcutt Quartet and experimental rock trio Unnatural Ways, but also for playing with big hitters like Nels Cline, Fred Frith and Carla Bozulich, among others. It’s hard to pin down Ava’s style, seemingly because she is adept in so many areas of guitar playing, as it becomes clear when you listen to The Circular Train, her second solo LP of charged avant garde rock, blues and jazz music.

Andrew Tuttle, Michael Chapman – Another Tide, Another Fish

“Another Tide, Another Fish” is an intelligent, intuitive album that demonstrates Andrew Tuttle’s highly creative and inquisitive nature. The late great Michael Chapman’s previously unfinished album now feels complete, showing his subtle psychedelic music at its best.

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