KLOF Mag Regular
Featuring Windborne, The Unthanks, Robbie Basho, Bonny Light Horseman (Live Review), Bridget Hayden, and a fantastic video premiere from Lisa Knapp & Gerry Diver and more.
Welcome to another KLOF Mag Regular, bringing you some of the latest highlights from KLOFMag.com.
Latest…
Please click on the titles to read the full article:
Lisa Knapp & Gerry Diver announce their first duo album ‘Hinterland’ and share ‘Hawk & Crow’
London-based folk singer, songwriter, ballad singer, fiddle player, musician, “digger and delver” Lisa Knapp and her partner, multi-instrumentalist, composer, producer and fiddle player extraordinaire Gerry Diver, are to release their first duo album. That may be hard to believe for those familiar with this duo who have worked together for so long.
On their forthcoming album, Hinterland (out 7th March 2025), they will fuse their deep-seated love for English and Irish folk traditions, weaving together folk horror, remembrance, and the landscapes that inspire their art.
“This album is a mix of themes, often drawn from the natural world and the people who inhabit it,” says Knapp. “We wanted to explore both what we know and what lies beyond our understanding in nature and history.”
They called upon singer, songwriter and visual artist Marry Waterson to create an animated video to accompany the single. I can think of no better person for the job when conjuring such folkloric visions into life.
Read more and watch the video in full, which is premiering on KLOF Mag today.
A Featured Album of the Month: Windborne – To Warm The Winter Hearth
By Thomas Blake
Windborne may be new to many British listeners, but the American vocal harmony group have built up quite a following on their own side of the pond, and their unique brand of folk music – songs from both sides of the Atlantic, arranged in an ostensibly similar fashion to British folk legends the Watersons – seems perfectly poised to make the jump to these shores. A four-piece consisting of Lauren Breunig, Jeremy Carter-Gordon, Lynn Rowan, and Will Rowan, Windborne already have a handful of albums behind them, including 2017 breakthrough Song on the Times – a collection of protest songs – and 2022’s Of Hard Times & Harmony. Despite the traditional nature of their material, the group have succeeded in a way that feels admirably contemporary: embracing social media, engaging communities and using online methods to fund releases (the crowdfunding campaign to get this particular project up and running earned them an eye-watering $400,000, apparently the biggest ever figure for a folk album and the 5th biggest crowdfunded album of all time on any platform).
…Along with Windborne’s almost supernatural grasp of harmony singing, this an impressive, evocative work of art.
Watch: Bridget Hayden and The Apparitions – She Moved Through the Fayre
Bridget Hayden shares her new single, an interpretation of the traditional folk song ‘She Moved Through the Fayre’. The accompanying video features footage of Abingdon Fair and Goose Fair, filmed between 1970-1979.
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Reviews
Robbie Basho – Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan: The Lost Live Recordings
By Glenn Kimpton
It’s somewhat a consensus that the magic of late guitar genius Robbie Basho’s music was best felt in concert. Unfortunately, the vast majority of us will not have experienced this virtuosic musician’s art first-hand due to him being still relatively unpopular up until he died back in 1986, but Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan: The Lost Live Recordings, a five-disc bumper live package and companion piece to 2020’s Song of the Avatars, is a hell of an alternative.
Like Avatars, the guiding hand behind this set of CDs is Liam Barker, the archivist also responsible for the excellent Voice of the Eagle documentary. Also, like the other box set, this is a mighty generous amount of music, with the five discs hitting an average run time of around forty-eight minutes each, meaning there is an awful lot to listen to.
…if you are a music lover and want a serious treat this festive period and beyond, Snow Beneath the Belly of a White Swan should be high on the list. The liner notes are extensive and contain some wonderful photographs, plus an essay by Robbie Dawson. The material to be discovered across all five discs totals several hours of music from a true original, an underrated giant of the guitar. Magic.
Alice Boyd – Cloud Walking
by Thomas Blake
A field recording of a gushing mountain stream, swathes of harp, an ethereal wordless hum: the first few moments of Alice Boyd’s second EP, Cloud Walking, situate you in a specific but somehow nebulous soundworld, pitched somewhere between the meditative new age music of Joanna Brouk, the dreamy harp-scapes of Mary Lattimore, and Joanna Newsom at her most pastoral. That first track, The Mountain, is only a minute and a half long, but it lays the groundwork for the creation of a stunning musical world, a place that can be homely and recognisable one moment, thrilling and mysterious the next.
Such a perfectly realised amalgamation of concept, melody and landscape is vanishingly rare, but on Cloud Walking, Alice Boyd achieves it with an easy grace.
Rami Atassi – New & Ancient Christmas Music
by Gareth Thompson
For decades, Rami Atassi has heard Christmas music played on church pipe organs, with carols being sung by lots of people out of tune. Interestingly, he cites both these elements as stimuli for his very inventive seasonal EP, New & Ancient Christmas Music. Atassi is a widely acclaimed Syrian American guitarist and teacher based in Chicago. Indian influences often infuse his work alongside Tuareg, afrobeat and spiritual jazz elements. Thus, he offers here a spicy blend to jollify a selection of commonplace yule tunes.
…Whilst some of us know Christmas as a time of sleet and squall, parts of our world endure the season in sweltering climes. Atassis’s radiant and rhythmic set is a reminder that global connections endure in the message of goodwill.
The Unthanks – In Winter
by Bob Fish
The Unthanks In Winter is a rare offering that evokes the vast emotions of the cold winter months. It is a massive statement, a project that has taken around fifteen years to evolve, it has been well worth the wait.
David A. Jaycock – Music for Space Age Shopping
by Thomas Blake
An entire subgenre of hauntology seems to have grown up around shopping centres. They occupy a sweet spot where utopian ideas of the future meet mid-century capitalist growth head-on; they embody an intangible sense of nostalgia while also tapping into very real and very specific – if sometimes idealised – memories. Shopping centres are meeting points, especially for the young, and as such, they are a wellspring of shared memory. The strange, futuristic elements of their design are often lost on us until after the event: we don’t realise quite how forward-thinking some of the architecture was until it’s no longer forward-thinking any more.
Some of these shopping centres attracted criticism for their modernist or brutalist architectural style, particularly as they often replaced established Victorian buildings. Now, we are losing many of those modernist buildings, replaced in turn by contemporary centres whose emphasis is often on ‘experiential retail’ or ‘retailtainment’, and we are left to mourn the loss of buildings we once reviled or took for granted. In this way, nostalgia is created.
Music is perhaps the medium best suited for capturing that nostalgia, and of all our current musicians, David A. Jaycock is best placed to provide a soundtrack to these strange, disappearing places.
With ‘Music for Space Age Shopping’, David A. Jaycock has achieved something quietly spectacular: an album rooted in highly specific locales and timeframes which nonetheless allows you to drift into nostalgia or to imagine better possible futures.
Aboubakar Traoré & Balima – Sababu
by David Pratt
Ghent-based Zephyrus Music has been promoting world music and jazz offerings from established and emerging talent for two decades. Sababu, the second release from Aboubakar Traoré and Balima, is destined to be one of their most treasured releases.
The Burkina Faso-born master of the kamélé n’goni is again joined by his multi-national group Balima, comprising Guillaume Codutti, percussion & backing vocals, Zonata Dembélé, bass & backing vocals, Geoffrey Desmet, balafon, djembe & backing vocals and Désiré Somé, guitar & backing vocals. Constructed around Aboubakar’s original compositions, which were then arranged collectively by the band, the album takes the listener on a journey which further pushes the traditional boundaries of West African music, melding Traoré’s proud heritage with soulful jazz and reggae inflections, more than a hint of western electric guitar tones, memorable melodies and vocal contributions, all underscored by sumptuous pan-African rhythms.
…Sababu transcends time and geographical borders, creating an album of hope, pride, and optimism. Above all, it is an album of celebration.
Chris Cleverley – In The Shadow of John The Divine
by Mike Davies
Named after the iconic Manhattan Cathedral, In The Shadow of John The Divine is Chris Cleverley‘s first new music in two years. He once again weaves his characteristic experimental style with a trademark sweet-voiced intimacy and inviting melodies as the songs put a personal spin on the usual festive fare that blends joy and wistfulness in the seasonal cocktail of often contradictory emotions, love and grief.
Definitely one for your Christmas stocking.
Adam Finchler – The Room
by Thomas Blake
At various points in his career, Adam Finchler has embraced anti-folk storytelling, Strokes-y guitar minimalism and even, on 2016 track Mr Death, a kind of existential dive-bar jazz. It’s the kind of music in which, through its sonic signifiers rather than in lyrical content, the city of New York is instantly discernible. With the mise en scene so vividly and effortlessly set, Finchler is free to indulge in his songcraft: in the clever, witty lyrics that have become the calling card of so many Anti-Folk New York guys over the years, but which he is better at than most.
Broadly speaking, the songs on The Room (Finchler’s debut solo album, after teasing us for a decade with EPs and singles) fall into two categories: on one hand, the short, surreal or minimal pieces that hang on pithy, unexpected statements, and on the other the strange but perfectly observed narratives, slightly longer and defined by their detail. Opening track Eye Massage falls squarely into the former group, a song in which Finchler tells us he has a coupon for an eye massage, and that’s about it. But it works, because the delivery is suitably deadpan and because the music – scuzzy, spiky, propulsive guitar – compels it to work.
…one of the most unusual, distinctive and delightful albums of the year.
Live Review: Bonny Light Horseman at The Roundhouse, London (20th November 2024)
by Mark Underwood
It’s the sheer sense of enjoyment that Bonny Light Horseman have in each other’s company that is the key takeaway from tonight’s performance at The Roundhouse. As a band, their comradeship clearly runs deep.
Our End-of-Year Lists are being finalised, so keep an eye out for our Top 100 Albums of 2024 and a series of Top 10s from some of our writers.
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