KLOF Mag Regular
New Mixtape | Interviews with Sam Amidon and Jordan Wax | Album Reviews: Róis, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, Onilu, The Weather Station | New music from Jim Ghedi, Jeffrey Lewis, Varo & more
Below are some of the recent highlights from KLOF Mag. These are just snippets, as many of our reviews and interviews are not short. To read an article in full, click on the title. Also, due to its length, your email program might cut this newsletter short, so just click on the newsletter title to view it in full on your browser.
Our latest Mixtape, KLOF No. 38, is an eclectic offering featuring new music from the likes of Sam Amidon, whose new album, Salt River, is now out (read our album review and in-depth interview), the swamp-raised, phone-fi alt-folk of hemlock, Joshua Burnside, RÓIS, Richard Dawson, Tashi Dorji, Jim Ghedi, Jeff Parker ETA IVtet, Onilu (Joe Chambers, Kevin Diehl, Chad Taylor), David Michael Moore and obscure sounds such as Field Recordings from the Amazonian Lowlands, Recordings from various radio broadcasts on location in India – courtesy of Alan Bishop and Richard Bishop. There’s also music from Ian Lynch’s One Leg One Eye, New York United, 75 Dollar Bill and more.
Artist of the Month Interview: Sam Amidon
Danny Neill chats with Sam Amidon about his influences, his love of instrumental music, jazz, and folk, and the creation of his sublime new album, Salt River, which is out now.
By his own admission, Sam Amidon’s head is swimming in music about “twenty-three and a half hours a day”, and chatting with this 21st-century renaissance man ahead of the release of sublime new album ‘Salt River’, he certainly talks like a man with mind and ears alive to all the wonderous potential sonics and folklore have to offer. The record is as eclectic in its range as you will hear on any new 2025 release, and it takes a heavy roller approach to genres and boundaries, finding connections and unlocking doors that previously lay dusty and unexplored. Sam was talking to KLOF Mag via Zoom, and our wide-ranging conversation began with enquiries about the creation of ‘Salt River’…
Jim Ghedi shares a dystopian new single
Jim Ghedi’s new single, Sheaf & Feld, is out now: dystopian post-folk with synths, electric guitars, heavy drums, and a remarkable falsetto. It’s a giant of a song…totally blown away by the energy of it all. He also shared a live session…
Jordan Wax on his Yiddish recording debut
The new album, טײַטש [The Heart Deciphers], from New Mexico-based musical and linguistic polymath Jordan Wax, may focus on his love for the Yiddish language, but it’s also an exploration of larger Jewish concepts of identity in a world gone mad. The songs on the album, nearly all of which Jordan wrote, are deeply contemporary, speaking to apocalyptic climate change, the ravages of capitalism, the bloodlust of power, the loss of culture, even the current violence in Israel/Palestine. It’s also a deeply personal album, drawn from Wax’s own Jewish heritage and filled with his thoughts on some of the most difficult topics of our current time. Co-produced with fellow New Mexican Jeremy Barnes of Neutral Milk Hotel and A Hawk and a Hacksaw, the album melds klezmer instrumentation with larger indie rock arrangements, all tied together by Wax’s multi-instrumental skills (he plays nine instruments on the album). The album also features the surprising diversity of Yiddish itself. Half the songs are written in the Litvish dialect of Yiddish, while the other half are in klal-shprakh (secular literary Yiddish), and one incorporates a mish-mash of Yiddish dialects that reflects its transmission among displaced Jews of different regions in partisan camps during the Holocaust. Though a non-Yiddish speaking listener might miss this, it’s a hallmark of Wax’s work in music and language to look this deeply into the complexities of a regional language or musical dialect.
Premiered on KLOF: The Ocelots - Australia
Taken from their forthcoming album ‘Everything, When Said Slowly’, The Ocelots premiere the video for their latest single ‘Australia’, which tackles the personal theme of migration.
“The song was the sum of scrapped and recycled parts, feelings and concepts. My first rule
was to write something uncomfortably honest no matter what, regardless of whether it’s
relatable. I’m an anxious sleeper, and sometimes I wake up dishevelled and the haziness
doesn’t clear till later in the afternoon. I started documenting that experience, dropping in
biographical clues into my songs.”
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Jeffrey Lewis announces new album and shares “Sometimes Life Hits You”
Due for release on 21st March on Blang Records (and Don Giovanni in the US), Jeffrey Lewis has announced his new album, The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis; this news was accompanied by his lead single and video, “Sometimes Life Hits You”, a song that proved so popular during his post-pandemic tour, that audiences spontaneously screamed along to the “Fuck, That Hurt!” choruses.
…if you enjoy old-school comic books, then keep an eye out for the “Easter eggs” in this video – “…are you enough of an expert on comic book history to identify some of the iconic panels that get humorously repurposed?”
Dublin duo VARO announce new album The World That I Knew and share lead single
Dublin-based duo VARO announce their new album, The World That I Knew, feat. Ian Lynch, John Francis Flynn, Anna Mieke, Alannah Thornburgh, Junior Brother, Lemoncello, Niamh Bury and more. Watch the video for their lead single ‘Red Robin’ ft. Alannah Thornburgh.
Reviews
Bonnie “Prince” Billy – The Purple Bird
Will Oldham’s name has, for a while now, been a byword for a certain type of artistry that seems to be getting less and less common, a way of creating that involves complete autonomy and yet leaves generous room for collaboration. Any Oldham release – regardless of the name he is using at any given time – is strikingly, incontrovertibly his, conceived and recorded apparently without any attempt to pander to prevailing trends or appease the whims of the music industry. It has obviously helped that he has spent much of his career circling around the Domino Records/Drag City axis, where complete creative control is a given, but even so, there are very few musicians out there doing exactly what they want to do in quite such a determined and consistent way as Oldham.
It’s an approach that continues to serve him well. Oldham is now more than thirty years into his recording career, and has recorded somewhere in the region of twenty solo albums (and more than a handful of collaborations), mostly under the Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy moniker. His new release is, to put it in the simplest terms, a country and western album. It will go down as a solo project, but in reality, the presence of producer Dave ‘Ferg’ Ferguson is palpable all over The Purple Bird. The creative partnership has a similar feel to that between Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier on Histoire de Melody Nelson, or perhaps Bob Dylan’s collaboration with Jacques Levy on Desire (like Levy, Ferguson has songwriting credits on many of these tracks).
Onilu (Joe Chambers, Kevin Diehl, Chad Taylor) – Onilu
Back in 2021, one of my essential albums was Drag City’s Mind Maintenance, a duo instrumental album featuring Joshua Abrams’ guimbri and the mbira playing of Chad Taylor. Appropriately titled and timed for a fraught period (peak of COVID, etc.), the album was a tonic, coming when the world’s population needed soothing. Chad Taylor now lines up as one-third of Onilu (a Yoruba word meaning simply ‘drummer’), an all-percussion instrumental band, whose modus operandi, it seems, is to get a foot tapping. Armed with a host of percussive instruments, Chad, Kevin Diehl (Sonic Liberation Front) and Joe Chambers (M’Boom, etc.) are given not only centre stage but the entire stage to mesmerise us with their instrumental and composition skills.
For any of us wondering if percussion alone is enough to hold the attention, this set wastes no time in settling the listener (see Jim White and Chris Corsano, among others, for further reassurance). Invocation starts steadily, with a nifty rhythm and touches of hand drums, before a second beat settles in. It immediately screams confidence, with the players happy to allow the music to unfold at its own pace. But it is also subtly very technical and performed with such assurance that the whole concept quickly gets exciting…
RÓIS – MO LÉAN
MO LÉAN is a tribute to, and reimagining of, the pre-Christian tradition of ‘keening’. Like charismatic meditation or talking in tongues, grieving becomes the griever. Language deconstructs into ritual.
As Brecht once asked, in the dark times will there also be singing? In the same vein, ‘WHAT DO YOU SAY’ constitutes an extraordinary opening – once more, closer to theatre than anything else, where a voice wavers, hovers at the enormity of it all. The stuttery, manic repetition evokes Beckett’s Not I, or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis: ‘What…what…do you…do you say?’
RÓIS’ voice is astounding – one that will often quiver, as though circling a trauma amid a backdrop of murderous, patriarchal Catholicism and British colonialism. And on one level, it’s horrific, like listening to someone screaming. But, beyond this, there’s healing. And you don’t just ‘listen’ to RÓIS; you absorb, and finally transform into, RÓIS.
The Weather Station – Humanhood
Much the same in real life as that of a recording artist, the yearning for the simpler times of earlier years can be the mountain to climb. Humanhood is the seventh album released by Tamara Lindeman in her creative guise as The Weather Station, and the evolution from those initial releases could not be more pronounced. Previously, the music was played in a simple, atypically folky idiom, cloaked in melodrama and mournfulness with frequent flashes of optimistic acoustic sunlight bursting through. Nowadays, especially following a preceding brace of reputation dismantling and critically lauded records, those days of simplicity feel long gone. Tamara, in 2025, makes music that reflects the troubled state of her psyche, but in doing so, she is also presenting albums that paint a broader picture of the human condition in the modern world.
So, in the midst of this very 21st-century malaise, we find Lindeman throwing her creative energies into music that, whilst not trying to make sense of it all, does have the effect of offering an arm around the shoulder, whispering we are all in this together.
Stein Urheim – Speilstillevariasjoner
Stein Urheim has been a mainstay of Norway’s alternative music scene – and in particular, those acts gathered around the brilliant indie label Hubro – for almost thirteen years. With his wide-ranging and constantly shifting approach to genre, he is something of a flagship for an entire scene, bringing jazz-prog guitar workouts, spacy synth atmospherics, folk-adjacent improvisation and minimalist composition together under one roof. Speilstillevariasjoner is his seventh album for the label and sees him dig deeper into a mode of expression he has touched on a few times before: short, experimental compositions played on fretless guitars with unconventional tunings, inspired by Chinese and Norwegian folk music as well as the microtonality and minimalism of composers like La Monte Young.
dbh and the Dark Pool/PPYO – Ceremonial County Tape Series: Vol.XII – West Midlands | Warwickshire
Another dispatch from the weird and wonderful world of Folklore Tapes’ Ceremonial Counties series. This time round, it’s the turn of Warwickshire and the West Midlands (though both sides feature musicians based in Todmorden, Yorkshire, a town that seems to have established itself as a cradle of all things strange and experimental).
It features a satanic brew from dbh and The Dark Pool that most contemporary stoner rock bands would sacrifice their grandmothers for and a satisfyingly devilish and wholly fitting companion piece from the Primitive Percussion Youth Orchestra.
Mary Chapin Carpenter, Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart – Looking for the Thread
Looking for the Thread brings together Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart, and Mary Chapin Carpenter, a project born out of the tail end of Covid, initiated by Carpenter, who felt the time was right for a collaborative venture. She’d previously worked with Fowlis on the Transatlantic Sessions, and Fowlis, in turn, has worked with Polwart on several occasions, including the much-loved Spell Songs project.
Looking for the Thread was produced by Bonny Light Horseman’s Josh Kaufman, who also plays guitar and keys, with guest backing instrumentation from Rob Burger on keys, drummer Chris Vatalaro (drums, percussion), and bassist Cameron Ralston (bass) as well as Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh (The Gloaming) on the Hardanger d’Amore, a ten-string fiddle.
Rose City Band – Sol Y Sombra
Talking about the making of the album, Rose City Band’s frontman, Ripley Johnson, shared, “One of my takeaways from making this record is that I spent a lot of energy trying to do things a little different but ended up back where I started in many ways, And that’s OK.” A sentiment that’s also expressed on Wheels, “Life in peace/ In the sun/ All the hearts turning/ Back to one“. With Sol Y Sombra, Rose City Band don’t shy away from what may lie ahead; they continue charting new directions in both the sun and shade.
Loudon Wainwright III – Loudon Live In London
“Loudon Live in London” was recorded during a residency at Nell’s Jazz and Blues in London in 2024. It finds Loudon Wainwright III in top form, covering favourites, five brand-new songs and working an appreciative crowd in his familiar chatty and self-deprecating form.