KLOF Mag Regular
Featuring Clara Mann, Georgia Ruth, Rachael McShane, Gigspanner Big Band, Dick Gaughan, Natalie Wildgoose, Toria Wooff, Cameron Knowler, Alex Rex, Jeffrey Lewis, Claire Rousay, Angel Bat Dawid & more.
Here is some of the music that we’ve been spending time with lately.
Due to the length of our album reviews and articles, the highlights below serve as a short taster. To read in full, just click on a title, which will take you to the full article on KLOF Mag.
Clara Mann – Rift
A large part of Mann’s gift is her ability to alchemise her specific experience into a universal emotional reaction, something she does with lightness and an ear for a concise and cutting phrase. …That so many emotions are being unpacked, examined and realigned at the same time shows just how accomplished a songwriter she has become, and in such a short space of time too. In the space of a debut album, Clara Mann has gone from ‘one to watch’ to one of the best songwriters in the country.
Video Premiere & Track-by-Track: Georgia Ruth’s new EP ‘Cooler Head’
To celebrate World Piano Day (March 29th), Georgia Ruth is releasing ‘Cooler Head’ today, a companion EP to her celebrated 2024 album Cool Head. Watch Georgia recording the tracks live and read her exclusive Track-by-Track.
An awful lot has happened in Georgia Ruth’s personal life and in the world at large since her debut eleven years ago, but what hasn’t changed is her enviable gift for creating gorgeous, open-hearted folk songs full of intelligence, invention and emotional weight. Cool Head is an album with the feel of an instant classic about it, and is her strongest offering yet.
Thomas Blake, KLOF Mag
“It was a really interesting experience, going back into the same studio where we made the album, to re-interpret those songs by myself,” she says. “I deliberately didn’t rehearse beforehand, I was intrigued to see what would happen if I just sat at the piano, and let the songs dictate how they wanted to be played. Time had passed since the original sessions, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a different energy in the room, and in the songs – a sense of having come out the other side, a little different! It made sense to call this Cooler Head.”
Natalie Wildgoose – Come into the Garden
Sometimes, music has an intangible quality that is extremely difficult to pin down in the confines of a conventional review. We find ourselves reaching for words that don’t really mean much – fleeting, nebulous, ghostly – but are all that we can offer in the face of a work of art that holds our attention in mysterious or inscrutable ways. I remember first hearing Sibylle Baier’s mesmerising collection Colour Green – recorded in the early 1970s but not released until 2006 – and thinking how difficult it would be to review, how the language of criticism would almost certainly fail to do it justice.
I get a similar sort of feeling listening to Come Into the Garden, the new EP from Natalie Wildgoose.
Toria Wooff – Toria Wooff
Giving this debut album release a self-title is rather apt, for by her own admission, the thread that binds this collection of songs is life and the living of it. Singer, songwriter, painter and poet Toria Wooff sees the songs as “chapters to dip in and out of, moments immortalised in time, bound together by nothing more than the human experience.” That is very much the impressionistic inflection of the song sequence; whilst there is not a narrative-based story at play, these snapshots are evocative enough and of a type to sound like they belong together despite all being written independently of each other. The fine honing of the sound ushers in that unity also; do not be fooled into expecting a medieval, baroque texture when you see the cover art depicting Toria reclining on a church pew in the 15th Century haunted mansion Stanley Palace. No, it is a far more recent echo permeating these tracks, namely the intimate and warm nylon-stringed fireside crackle that instantly recalls those late sixties, early seventies albums produced by the likes of Leonard Cohen or Dory Previn.
Rachael McShane & The Cartographers – Uncharted (A Featured Album of the Month)
There is something very pure, direct and clear about this second album from strings player Rachael McShane and her Cartographers band. Their first effort, When All is Still, was released back in 2018, with Rachael joined by guitarist Matthew Ord and melodeon player Julian Sutton. Uncharted sees Matthew’s shoes filled by Ian Stephenson, with Julian returning, Andy May providing piano on selected songs and a host of backing singers on final track, Windy Old Weather.
Rachael first hit the circuit in a big way as an original member of folk juggernaut Bellowhead and helped the band drop five highly successful studio albums, as well as lending her talents on numerous live extravaganzas, including the returning tours in 2022 and 2024. For her work with the Cartographers, Rachael simplifies the sound significantly, with guitar and melodeon gently entwined with violin or viola and subtle piano. It is delicate music indeed, but played with high skill and creative musicianship, which allows these eight vocal pieces and two instrumentals to soar.
Cameron Knowler – CRK
The last time Cameron Knowler’s name came up was vicariously through Charles ‘Poppy Bob’ Walker’s wonderful Dirt Bike Vacation album, the tapes of which Cameron discovered and helped release. For CRK, his follow-up to 2021’s Places of Consequence, Cameron seems to have taken up some of the lo-fi character that is present across Dirt Bike, with the guitar playing sounding unfussy and captured in situ.
CRK feels like a pivotal album for Cameron. With nods to players like William Tyler, Chuck Johnson and Bruce Langhorne, as well as music that feels timeless and forward-looking, it is an adventurous set, permeated by that underlying sense of sadness and melancholy peppering the songs, giving them a different shade and an interesting character. All of these details result in a fine album, mature and assured in its arrangements and performance.
Artist of the Month Interview: Gigspanner Big Band
Asking musicians about their influences can be a bit of a journalistic shortcut. It provides an easy way in, and is a simple trick for teasing out why a particular band or album sounds like it does. It also helps those readers who may not be au fait with the band’s output to position it in the musical landscape. In a manner of speaking, a list of influences is like a set of coordinates. But in the case of the Gigspanner Big Band, the question opens up a slightly different can of worms. Instead of narrowing down their sound or helping to put it in a neat little box, it leads the listener towards the understanding that their new album, Turnstone, exists in a tradition of sprawling and inclusive experimentalism, where variation and difference are celebrated and encouraged.
Bandleader Peter Knight, for example, lists progressive and improvisational jazz musicians (Phil Minton and Maggie Nichols, Trevor Watts and Veryan Weston) among his current favourites, along with composers like Bruch and Paganini, Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan, gypsy jazz moderniser Biréli Lagrène and baroque singers Philippe Jaroussky and Marie-Nicole Lemieux. Drummer Sacha Trochet adds Jimmy McGriff, Weather Report, Santana and Cuban music. Philip Henry is currently listening to Talk Talk, as well as country, gospel and early blues. John Spiers has a soft spot for Steely Dan, the Beach Boys and 80s and 90s pop, and guitarist Roger Flack leans towards the bluesy, funky side of fusion (Richard Bona, Larry Carlton, Liane Carroll).
more eaze & claire rousay – no floor
P.S. Lower-case titles are intentional.
You get the impression that Texan experimentalists, instrumentalists and sound artists claire rousay and mari maurice, who performs as more eaze, will never make two similar albums. If anything, no floor is conceptually closer to their 2020 debut, if I don’t let myself be happy now then when?, than the autotune pop of 2022’s never stop texting me, but it’s still a far cry. if I don’t, used found sound and field recordings to explore life experiences in abstract, whereas no floor, an instrumental record, eschews the found sound approach for the most part and focuses more on created music as collage, with pedal steel and slow guitar swirling among electronic beeps and low violin notes, giving the music a more Americana through a lens bent.
This is the duo’s most organic and free-flowing record is full of ideas and uses the collage form to its full potential, with not a wasted note to be heard. It is a lean album, with five tracks spanning thirty minutes, and has been crafted impeccably. Highly recommended.
Alex Rex – The National Trust
Singer, songwriter, drummer and former Trembling Bells frontman Alex Neilson describes his Alex Rex solo project as ‘ghost rock’, a designation that has never been more fitting than it is now. The National Trust is slated to be the last Alex Rex album, and while much of Neilson’s work in the past has felt like a reckoning of sorts, the feeling here is intensified. The album feels haunted and heightened as if Neilson is coming to terms with the ghosts of his past moving on. And in a way, that is what’s happening. The songs on The National Trust deal directly with the sudden death of Neilson’s brother Alastair and the great pool of grief that formed in the aftermath. It’s no surprise that these songs sound as if they are inhabited by restless, shifting spirits. Neilson has always been hard on himself, to the extent that he’s turned self-deprecation into an exquisitely painful artform, so when that flagellatory urge is sharpened by a very real loss, the emotional sparks really start to fly.
Whitney Johnson & Lia Kohl – For Translucence
Phewie! This one is a trip. Cellist Lia Kohl and viola player Whitney Johnson’s debut album sees their collected experience as sound artists and improvisers fully transform a collaboration that began in 2018 by exploring the space between the cello and viola notes. If you take a look at the text that comes with this release, including the techniques and methods involved in stitching together this weird sonic tapestry, you’ll have an idea of how intricate and complex a project it is. I’ll try to give you an idea of the levels of creativity, originality and experimentalism present throughout this set…
A forty-minute journey is split into four tracks of a similar length, all with dual numbered titles, lending the abstract nature of the music more ambiguity; there is no Sunset over Dales style clue-giving to be found here.
While it’s a tricky album to pin down, but you’ll be glad you gave it the time and space to reveal itself.
Jeffrey Lewis – The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis
We don’t deserve Jeffrey Lewis. Songwriting of this quality seems to belong in the halcyon days of the 1990s, when David Berman and Will Oldham were beginning to peak, or even in the distant and rarified climes of Greenwich Village in the 1960s. With that in mind, it’s fitting that The Even More Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis contains not only a song about Berman but also a not-so-subtle (and weirdly glorious) reference to Bob Dylan’s second album in its title and cover. As a standard-bearer for the New York anti-folk scene, Lewis has never been afraid to combine clever lyrics, sly asides and brash statements, and more than a quarter of a century into his recording career, he is showing no signs of slowing down.
The album’s cover – essentially a nude version of Dylan’s Freewheelin’ – is a good indication of what Lewis is about, at least on the surface. Funny, literate, soaked in pop culture, immediately accessible. But he’s much more than that, and if you want to get to know the real Jeffrey Lewis, then the song about Berman is a good place to start. DCB & ARS is much more than biography or hagiography. It tells of a partly imagined, crime-based friendship between Berman and the writer Amy Rose Spiegel. Yes, it’s funny and frothy, like a cutesy Natural Born Killers. But it’s also tender and twisty and, thanks in part to Mallory Feuer’s well-placed violin, not lacking in dramatic edge. Feuer’s violin takes centre stage on 100 Good Things, a live recording that does a bit more than it says on the tin: a list song that satirises lists but still manages to be positive.
News & Premieres
Video Premiere: Bridget Hayden – When I Was In My Prime (Live)
We had the pleasure of sharing a brooding live video of Bridget Hayden & The Apparitions (Sam Mcloughlin and Dan Bridgewood-Hill of dbh) performing When I Was In My Prime at Todmorden Unitarian Church.
Kickstarter Campaign: Dick Gaughan – R/evolution 1969-84 Boxset
Dick Gaughan: R/evolution 1969-84, is an 8-disc box set that aims to preserve and celebrate Dick’s legacy as well as remunerate him fairly and squarely for that work. To celebrate, enjoy 26 KLOF Mag Mixtapes from over the years featuring the man himself.
Premiere: The Deep Dark Woods share new single/video ‘Ruby’
The Deep Dark Woods return with their first new music since Broadside Ballads Vol. III. Watch the accompanying video to Ruby, a tender psychedelic waltz in which late-evening thoughts swirl around your head, cut adrift with no point of anchor.
Martin Carthy announces new album ‘Transform Me Then Into A Fish’
To commemorate his remarkable music career and 84th birthday, folk music legend Martin Carthy will release “Transform Me Then Into A Fish” on May 21st, 2025. The album represents a significant milestone and a complete circle as he revisits his seminal 1965 self-titled debut with newly recorded arrangements. Guests include his daughter, Eliza Carthy, as well as Sheema Mukherjee, who also performed alongside Martin and Eliza in the much-missed Imagined Village.
Brìghde Chaimbeul shares new single ‘Bog an Lochan’ from upcoming album
Brìghde Chaimbeul announces her third solo album ‘Sunwise’ (out June 27th on tak:til/ Glitterbeat) and shares lead single ‘Bog an Lochan’. Watch the accompanying video filmed by Jonny Ashworth and John Smith.
Angel Bat Dawid & Naima Nefertari Announce New Collaborative Album
Composer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and multidisciplinary artist and musician Naima Nefertari (aka Karlsson) have announced a collaborative new album – a shared inquiry between two artists connected by music, research, and sisterhood. Journey To Nabta Playa will be released on May 2nd, 2025, via Spiritmuse Records.
It is described as a sonic journey through sacred time and space, a powerful meditation on memory, mythology, and ancestral science, drawing deep inspiration from the ancient astrological stone circle of Nabta Playa, nestled in the remote deserts of Nubia.
Dawid and Naima composed, performed and produced the album together—recorded between Dawid’s base in Chicago and Naima’s family home in Tågarp Schoolhouse, Sweden (home of Don and Moki Cherry). Additional parts were captured at Elastic Arts (Chicago) and CoLabyrinth (studio of Kahil El’Zabar), forging strong connections with community, lineage, and sound as ritual.
To coincide with the Spring Equinox, the album’s first single, “Procession of the Equinox,” is released today, inspired in part by Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly:
“They say the people could fly. Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. And they would walk up on the air like climbin’ up on a gate. And they flew like blackbirds over the fields. Black, shiny wings flappin’ against the blue up there.”