KLOF Mag Regular (a Weekend Update)
Featuring: The Gentle Good, Varo, Shane Parish, Swimming Bell, Lila Tristram
The Gentle Good – Elan (Featured Album of the Month)
By Glenn Kimpton
Back in 2023, Cardiff’s Gareth Bonello, stage name The Gentle Good, released Galargan, an eight-song set spanning under forty minutes and consisting of guitar, vocals and some sweeps of cello. A beautifully modest album, Galargan saw Gareth eschew collaborations that had been present on previous albums (Lisa Jen and Cate le Bon, among many others) and bring his singing and guitar playing to the fore. Fast forward to this year’s Elan, and we see a change from Gareth, with a wonderfully rich, multi-textured album of thirteen songs hitting almost double the run time of Galargan.
Elan is a concept album of sorts, a study of the Elan Valley in Powys through music, recorded off-grid in the Cambrian mountains. Gareth clearly felt that such a wide-reaching, vast canvas deserved a broader and more adventurous sonic palette, which Elan certainly delivers. Of course, the title refers to the Elan Valley, but the English definition of the word equally suits this dynamic, sometimes psychedelic set of songs.
Take Desert of Wales as an example; named after an area of the Cambrian mountains that was unfairly considered ‘extreme wilderness without majesty’ in historical writings, Gareth collaborates with the Rajasthan trio SAZ, musicians from another desert, to bring five minutes or so of joyous, energetic music. With ace bass and percussion framing some outstanding vocals, this song is a feast for the senses and totally cracking.
Opening song Ten Thousand Acres, referencing another underappreciated area of the valley, since flooded by the Birmingham Water Company at the beginning of the twentieth century, is somewhat lighter in body, with a gentle guitar refrain (I love the odd string buzz bringing the sound back down to earth) set to distorted drones and swirls of synth sound. Gareth’s vocal here is reminiscent of the psychedelic era of folk music (The Byrds maybe) and really brings a different aspect to the Welshman’s sound.
Moving on, To Be in Summer is a beautiful piece of pop music, bringing to mind artists like Simon and Garfunkel and the Rose City Band. With electric guitar, bass and strings drenching a strummed guitar part and richly produced vocals, this one continues the hints of psychedelia found in Ten Thousand Acres to slyly comment on the romanticisation of a rural summer life from the point of view of tourists and urbanites.
In a very different vein is Drygan, a mesmerising piece of piano music enhanced by scraps of field recordings, nature sounds and synthesised embellishments. Inspired by the uplands of Elenydd in Mid Wales, there is plenty of space in this piece, with eerie whistles swirling around a composition that evokes the starkness and majesty of such landscapes. It is strange and magical.
Also instrumental is Fleet, a guitar-led piece saluting the importance of the earnest sheepdog. Featuring the talents of Radnorshire guitar champ Toby Hay, this piece undulates like the landscapes it describes, with gorgeous, thick cello notes underpinning a joyous, celebratory guitar duet that hits its apex in the final minute.
Penultimate song Dark Skies has fun with some dramatic percussion and furtive low, bassy keyboard (I think, or synth) lines that frame a multi-layered vocal considering the very humbling act of stargazing. Some high synth lines and reverby manipulated guitar give this one a very clean and modern feel that lends itself well to the image of a vast sky. It leads us nicely into the final song, Elan, an instrumental nod to the Elan river that brings in electric piano and what sounds like synthesised marimba-style notes. The gorgeous strings that sweep in balance well with the sharper piano notes, clearly evoking the tussle of a flowing river. This is a far fuller arrangement than Drygan, the other piano-led instrumental here, but no less magical, and it is a fitting end to what is a hugely enjoyable set.
Elan is an admirable piece of work; a broad and generous soundscape for a beloved area of Wales, containing both music and singing that is diverse, adventurous and rich in character. Gareth Bonello’s most ambitious album so far, this bumper collection is a veritable triumph.
Elan (May 16th, 2025) Bubblewrap Collective
Order Elan bit.ly/ElanPreOrder
Iona Lane: Artist of the Month Interview
By Thomas Blake
Iona Lane has a deep affinity with the Scottish landscape. Her new album, Swilkie (reviewed here), is a love song to Scotland’s islands and the people who live there, and an impassioned plea for the conservation of wild spaces and communities on the margins. But Iona, who grew up in Yorkshire, is a relative newcomer to the region. She found time in her busy tour schedule to talk to KLOF about how she came to know and love her adopted homeland, and how it came to inform her music.
‘My mum is a geologist and loves the landscape and geology in the highlands, particularly on Mull and in Assynt,’ she begins. ‘This led to us spending a lot of time up here for school holidays. When I went to Leeds Conservatoire to study Folk Music I became interested in writing about landscapes. I remember discovering that the Songs of Separation album [the BBC Folk Award-winning collaboration conceived in the wake of the referendum on Scottish independence] was written and recorded on the Isle of Eigg. I saw the band perform the album at Cambridge Folk Festival and I loved the music. Knowing that it had been recorded in Eigg I went on my first solo trip to explore the island, I feel like that album gave me a lot of inspiration. I’m now based in Inverie in Knoydart, which is a remote peninsula of the mainland on the north side of Loch Nevis.’
Many of Iona’s early songs were concerned with mountain landscapes, but more recently, she seems to have turned towards coasts and islands for inspiration. Is there a reason for this change in perspective?
‘For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by islands and the coastline that separates land. There’s a sense of the unknown and mystery to the sea. The shoreline is like a threshold, between two states, the land and the sea; a boundary that has been drawn by the Earth. It’s ever changing, evolving, receding, growing, just like we are as human beings; an ever present reminder that things change over time. This still feels like the beginning of exploring these ideas but I suppose the ever changing tide has a lot to answer for the changes in perspective!’
Swilkie is the latest in a long and prestigious line of folk albums that engage with wild spaces. Iona is keen to explain why natural landscapes are such an important theme for her and for musicians in general.
‘As we move further into a digital age, I think the desire for something more natural and organic is becoming stronger. I think access to nature is incredibly important and many other musicians feel the same way. For me, they’re easier to write about than human beings!’
But as well as being steeped in nature, Swilkie is full of incredibly rich historical detail. I’m keen to know whether she needed to do a lot of research, and if so, how did she go about it, and is it an aspect of the work she enjoys?
‘Yes, research is a massive part of the writing process. A lot of the research was done in the places where we wrote the album, so on the Isle of Eigg, Isle of Mull and Sanday in Orkney, from the people we spoke to but also books about the places.’ She is also quick to emphasise the importance of more modern methods: ‘I did a fair amount of online research and used resources such as Tobar An Dualchais / Kist o Riches – it’s a great online resource. YouTube is also a big resource… I watched so many documentaries on lighthouses! I also love studying maps, you can learn a lot from a place by how the maps have developed over the years.’
One such piece of online investigation led to one of Swilkie’s most strikingly original songs, Albatross, which tells the true story of Albert the albatross, whose presence around the Shetland Islands made him a bit of a folk hero in the 1970s. Much has been written about Albert, including pieces by Bruce Chatwin and Gavin Francis (in his book Island Dreams), but Iona discovered him via a less conventional, more serendipitous route.
‘I think I found out about him on Geograph initially. Geograph is a website that has a freely accessible archive of geographically located photographs. Photographs in the Geograph collection are chosen to illustrate significant or typical features of each 1 km × 1 km grid square in the Ordnance Survey National Grid. I stumbled across one of Albert when looking at images of Hermaness in Unst!’
A few of Iona’s songs feature birds – Curlew and Staffa, as well as Albatross. She stresses the significance of birds in her life, but is self-deprecating when it comes to her own skill as an ornithologist.
‘I love birds,’ she says. ‘I think they’re such amazing creatures! Sadly I am not very good at IDing them but I feel their presence in landscapes is important and often hearing birds makes me feel grounded and safe. Seabird populations are so present on the islands that I think it would have been quite difficult not to write about them!’
Another important facet of Swilkie is its sense of community and collaboration. Her primary musical partner was Malin Lewis, who is credited as co-writer on many of these songs. How did she come to work with them and what was the songwriting process like?
‘I met Malin on the Making Tracks Residency in 2022 and I thoroughly enjoyed writing with them at the time. I love collaborating within songwriting and thought it would be fun to work with an instrumentalist rather than another songwriter. Malin brought an amazing energy to the writing process and they helped me create the album in a way that I would not have been able to alone.’
In a sense, the countryside and its topography, as well as people who inhabit the villages and crofts of rural Scotland, were as much a part of the collaborative process as Iona’s fellow musicians. This is particularly true of the album’s bonus disc, recorded live in various small venues. What made her want to include the disc of live recordings?
‘Sense of place is at the core of these songs and feeling connected with the landscape was a big part of the writing process. I wanted to capture some of the early stages of these songs and feature a few musicians who also feel a connection to those places. All of the location recordings are in different places and I thought they created a documentation of the creative process.’
And what about musicians beyond this immediate circle, who has inspired her work?
‘Karine Polwart is a huge inspiration of mine – her writing is just phenomenal! I also take a lot of inspiration from Joshua Burnside, Rachel Sermanni and Kris Drever. I’m really enjoying Joshua Burnside’s new album ‘Teeth of Time‘ at the moment.’
It’s something of a surprise that she has the time to listen to anything at all, given how full her diary is at the moment. But this hasn’t curtailed her enthusiasm, and it’s good to hear that she’s already thinking about future projects.
‘I’m super busy this year with touring the new album! I’m currently on tour in Germany, Denmark and The Netherlands and from the end of May I’m touring across Scotland, England and Wales. I am doing a wee bit of writing though and I have ideas for the next album. I am also running another Humankind Songwriting Retreat with Katie Spencer in April 2026 – there are limited spaces left if anyone is interested in booking on!’
Anyone who does manage to snap up one of those final spaces will be in for a treat – Iona Lane is one of the most talented and engaging songwriters around (details below).
Swilkie is out now – (DL/Double CD & Ltd Ed. Vinyl + Songbook): Bandcamp
Varo – The World That I Knew
by Thomas Blake
Some cities seem to have a life beyond normal geography: they are cultural meeting points, places where ideas are shared and grown and where art flourishes in new and specific ways. For the last few years, Dublin has been the foremost example of such places, giving us some of the most exciting and unique music of recent times. Varo are a crucial part of that scene. They ply their trade as a duo, but their second album, The World That I Knew (the long-awaited follow-up to their bewitching and accomplished self-titled 2020 debut), has a revolving cast of collaborators, picked judiciously from that fertile Dublin scene, and fostered by the sterling production of John ‘Spud’ Murphy, whose own mark on the resurgent Irish folk scene is indelible.
The core pairing of Consuelo Nerea Breschi and Lucie Azconaga (originally from Italy and France respectively, but long-settled in Ireland) are joined by a different artist or group on each of the album’s ten songs, and it makes for a remarkably diverse and unexpected set of songs. Red Robin, the album’s lead single, features the stunning Irish harp of Alannah Thornburgh. The harp’s usual lace-like complexity is offset by the toothsome vocal melodies. The song itself is an unusual one, casting a spell made up of deep nostalgia and longing, brightened by hope.
Ruth Clinton and Cormac Mac Diarmada add their voices to album opener Lovers and Friends, a song that relishes harmony, both in terms of its vocal arrangements and its themes of friendship and communality. The song’s dramatic fiddle sections add a sense of tension and ambiguity to proceedings. Singer Inni-K contributes to Heather on the Moor, alternately ghostly, urgent and pretty. Libby McCrohan adds her adroit bouzouki. The song flits between modes, a testament to the adaptability and versatility of folk music, and Varo’s skill at capturing and molding different moods.
This ability to harness varied emotional responses is keenly felt on individual tracks, but somehow over the whole album, the duo maintain a consistency of mood. There is a flow, a logical continuum, which is quite remarkable given the variety of artists on show. Green Grows the Laurel, with John Francis Flynn’s powerful and instantly recognisable vocals taking centre stage, is a distillation of the drama, melancholy and sense of resistance that can be felt in many of these songs. With its ethereal outro, it is also indicative of the strangeness that pervades Varo’s work and which makes them stand out from other traditional artists. Even in the moments of pureness and prettiness – like the unaccompanied Open the Door, with Wicklow singer Anne Mieke – have an underlying eeriness, a wildness condensed in the wordless, yearning wail of the backing vocals.
Varo are not averse to political statements, but they are made subtly and never to the detriment of the song. Green Grows the Laurel hints at the old animosity between Ireland and colonial Britain. The old bothy ballad Work Life Out to Keep Life In (with Niamh Bury, Angus MacAmhlaigh and Alex Borwick) seems witty and almost lighthearted on its surface, but conceals a level of trenchant social commentary that is more potent in post-Covid society than ever before.
There is an utterly beautiful version of Let No Man Steal Your Thyme with singing duo Lemoncelllo contributing to a novel arrangement featuring an irresistible combination of plucked and bowed strings. It is at once delicate and stormy, and the voices seem to come at you like winds from the four points of the compass. The inimitable Junior Brother sings on Skibbereen, aided by fiddler Ben McKenzie, providing one of the most fraught and emotionally uncompromising moments on the album. Here, the political and historical thread comes closest to the surface in a passionate narrative that takes in famine and failed uprisings. The social commentary remains clear in the next song, Sweet Liberty, suggested and sung by Lankum’s Ian Lynch. A ballad written two hundred years ago, its message of racial equality and freedom from oppression remains impactful to this day, and Lynch, in harmony with Breschi and Azconaga, delivers a typically formidable, compelling performance.
The World That I Knew represents the combination of years of work, an album with its roots in Covid lockdown, but with branches that spread through Dublin’s music scene and beyond. A lyric in the final track, Ewan MacColl’s Alone, provides the album with its title and also gives us some clue about its formation. ‘The world that I knew, it has vanished and gone,’ runs the opening line, to a dreamy, droning arrangement featuring Branwen and Slow Moving Clouds. Originally, the song spoke of personal anxieties and unspecified societal upheaval, but given this album’s gestation, it is easy to read it as a comment on the very real change that has taken place in the world in the last decade. Varo are brilliantly in tune with the various ways a song’s meaning can shift over time, and this collaborational format is perfect for documenting those shifts. The World That I Knew tracks contemporary concerns through traditional song, and it does so with beauty and fierce compassion.
The World That I knew (May 9th, 2025) Self Released
Order The World That I Knew via Bandcamp
Shane Parish announces new live LP: Solo At Cafe OTO
Shane Parish has announced a new live LP that is now available for pre-order. Titled Solo At Cafe OTO (out July 1st via his label, Red Eft Records), on which he explores British Folk ballads by Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins, American folk ballads by John Jacob Niles, and a song by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch, from the television program Twin Peaks, called “Sycamore Trees”.
Shane shared with us:
The album was recorded on November 14th, 2023. I was on tour with the Bill Orcutt Guitar Quartet, and we played an evening of solo sets at a sold-out show at Cafe OTO in London. It was the night before our concert at the London Jazz Fest.
This is an instrumental solo electric guitar set exploring British Folk ballads by Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins, American folk ballads by John Jacob Niles, and a song by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch, from the television program Twin Peaks, called “Sycamore Trees”.
All of it was played on a naked Fender Squier Telecaster plugged straight into the house amplifier. It is the same guitar I played when we recorded “4 Guitars Live” at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht the night before, and it is the same guitar that Bill Orcutt gave me two years prior, when he first hired me to transcribe Music for Four Guitars.
Different from the tight-knit arrangements on my 2024 studio album, Repertoire (Palilalia Records), my approach to interpreting the songs in this collection is akin to how I played on my 2016 album of folk music, Undertaker Please Drive Slow (Tzadik Records), where the melody of the ballad is a catalyst for discovery, allowing the song to steer the ship, and occasionally pulling ashore to tarry in a tide pool.
Solo At Cafe OTO is released on July 1st via Shane’s own label, Red Eft Records.
Pre-Order the album now on Bandcamp (Digital/Ltd Vinyl/Autographed Test Pressings): Bandcamp
Also:
Swimming Bell - Somnia
Katie Schottland has created something quite magical. While Somnia is just five songs, the moments, the magic, and the memories reveal a depth to her music that will draw you back for repeated listenings. Read Bob Fish’s review here.
Lila Tristram – Overtake (Song of the Day)
Friday’s Song of the Day comes from Lila Tristram, whose new single ‘Overtake’ is released today. Tristram isn’t afraid of sharing her inner thoughts, but how she presents them makes them outstanding and memorable. There’s a melancholic shimmer to her delivery that does recall some of the classic contemporary folk singers of the past, and she wholeheartedly deserves those comparisons to Drake and Mitchell.
In case you missed it, we have a new Mixtape out featuring Swimming Bell, Avery Friedman, Sacred Paws, Friendship, Herman Düne, The Owl Service, Quinie, Poor Creature, Brown Wimpenny, Donald WG Lindsay, Iona Lane, Bells Larsen, Joseph Allred, Hayden Pedigo, William Tyler and more.
Have a great weekend.