Klof Mag Regular (free newsletter)
Martin Simpson, New Mixtape, Dana Gavanski, Nimah Bury, Daisy Rickman, Olivia Channey, Ben Nicholls, Moris Tepper, Sam Lee, Analog Africa and more.
Welcome to another of our free newsletters, in which I highlight some of the happenings over at KLOF Mag that deserve extra attention.
Artist of the Month: Martin Simpson - Skydancers
Our Artist of the Month for April is Martin Simpson. His new album ‘Skydancers’ is due for release on Topic Records this month (12th April). Glenn Kimpton reviewed the album for KLOF, which I urge you to read in full here.
The music exudes class and quality; the traditional song choices are interesting and (unsurprisingly) impeccably performed, while the originals are ace, with songs like Billy Waters demonstrating Martin’s chops. The playing throughout is faultless, but what impresses most is the restraint. No notes are wasted here; all decisions to enhance the song with instrumental flourishes land. This is an excellent record from a master of his craft.
We have more from Martin coming up, including an interview about Skydancers.
Latest Mixtape: KLOF # 30
If you’re a Premium Newsletter subscriber, you will have been sent this new Mix last week. Premium subscribers can listen and download it here:
If you are a free subscriber, please use the link below.
It features featuring Las Lloronas, Matthew Halsall, Orchestre tout puisaant marcel duchamp, Cosmo Sheldrake, Sam Lee, Awen Ensemble, Daisy Rickman, Lucas Santtana, Cocanha, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru and more.
Monday Morning Brew
For those new to the Monday Morning Brew, every Monday, I put together a free playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. This rolling playlist get’s changed every Monday so there’s still a few days left to enjoy the latest, our 44th Edition, featuring Mark Fry, Daisy Rickman, Ryley Walker, The Keithe Lowrie Duet, Mich Blue Smaldone, P.G. Six, Nico, Ed Askew, Jim Ghedi, Mugwort, Dando Shaft, North Sea Radio Orchestra, Carol Kleyn, These Trails, Appendix Out, Anne Briggs and more.
If you follow and save the playlist, you’ll automatically get a fresh brew every Monday to start your week.
Listen on Spotify | Apple Music
Album Reviews of Note
Dana Gavanski - Late Slap
Late Slap appeals directly to the senses. Every moment feels like an invitation to immersion. From the choppy, new-wave rhythms of Ears Were Growing (which seems haunted by XTC and the Talking Heads) to the sweet star-struck strum of Eye On Love, these are songs concerned with the inextricable link between experience and feeling. Ribbon, particularly with its lopes, lilts and twists, is deliciously multisensory, giving the listener a chance to engage with the grief and loss in the lyrics. Gavanski seems to coat her songs with a lacquer, altering their colours ever so slightly and making them more tactile.
There is a surprise around every one of Late Slap’s many corners, from the driving art-rock of Dark Side to the playful, Eastern-influenced melodies that balance out the soul-searching lyrics of Reiteration. These surprises are born from risk, and when an artist foregrounds their risk-taking this way, it really has to come off. In Gavanski’s case, it does so spectacularly. Late Slap is a detailed and accomplished work with a fleshy and often complex sound which never gets in the way of the inherently airy melodicism.
Sam Lee – songdreaming
There’s no mistaking the rallying call that songdreaming represents but that call rings out from music that demands to be explored in its own right. At its foundation is the enthralling combination of drumming and double bass that Joshua and Mishra develop. The opening few bars of tracks tend to provide the best opportunities to enjoy their interplay, free of competition from other instruments. But it is ubiquitous, frequently along with James’ piano, setting a structure for the melody instruments to explore. Of these, Jo’s violin is most often heard, ranging from gently melodic to screamingly intense, sometimes in the same track.
Having largely treated vocal and instrumental aspects separately, it’s worthwhile to bring them back together. The album pleases on so many levels, the pleasure building with each listen, letting the significance of the stories told by the lyrics build in your mind while powerful arrangements do what music does best, evoking emotional response after emotional response. Read the full review.
Niamh Bury – Yellow Roses
There are debut albums that you can praise for the potential they hint at, the promise of what might unfold and evolve in an artist’s progress further down the road, and then there are those like Yellow Roses, where an act arrives fully loaded and delivering the goods from the outset. Niamh Bury’s debut album is rich in ideas and fully occupied by able execution. The music is crafted imaginatively by a musical mind eager to unlock those rays of light in the sound that shine on each bar of music, subtly changing the colour and shape in ways that ensure there is never a dull moment, no periods where the listener will feel that the same ground is being covered. Yellow Roses is delightfully organic, too, proffering a hand-made feel that is so pivotal to great folk music that you can almost feel the impression of those guitar strings on your fingers as Niamh Bury chisels away at these songs. Then there is that voice on top of it all, strong in accent and pure in tone, a natural instrument rippling with youthful zest and yet simultaneously haunted by ancient ghosts; it results in these songs being sung with both conviction and grace. Read the full review.
Daisy Rickman - Howl
Daisy Rickman is a painter as well as a musician, and it shows: her music is uniquely visual, and each song on her new album Howl seems to invent new and dreamlike colours. She is clearly indebted to the strange light of Cornwall’s ancient landscapes, and these songs seem to reflect or refract that light into sparkling, lapidary patterns or hazy vistas. In an alternative reality where Nico teamed up with the Incredible String Band instead of the Velvet Underground, we might have had something that approaches the anxious bliss and incantatory majesty of Howl, but as it is, there is very little in the history of popular music to prepare us for these ten utterly beguiling compositions.
Howl is a wonder, an ancient pastoral dream of an album full of contemporary resonances.
Although not from the album, watch this video of Daisy performing Willow’s Song live (from a year ago).
Olivia Chaney - Circus of Desire
There is an alluring, timeless quality to everything Olivia Chaney does. The formula is relatively simple: folk-adjacent piano or guitar balladry, occasionally topped off with a nod to the psychedelia Chaney embraced earlier in her career. But the devil is in the detail, or, more pertinently, the delivery. Chaney’s most outwardly noticeable attribute is her voice – redolent of the very best folk singers of the past, but clipped by something bordering on the classical – but it’s the way she puts that voice to use that really impresses on her third studio album Circus of Desire. A combination of restraint and abandon characterises these songs. Restraint implies a kind of tension, and it is the controlled release of this tension that makes Chaney’s singing – and her arrangements – so admirable.
…an album of great maturity, crystalline beauty and sometimes painful self-knowledge, one that marks Olivia Chaney out as one of our finest singers and one of our most valuable and accomplished songwriters.
Steeleye Span - The Green Man Tour 2024
Steeleye Span are celebrating their 55th Anniversary and The Green Man Tour 2024 kicks off in May.
See where they're playing and book your tickets here.
Album Reviews continued…
Congo Funk! – Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River
Close to a decade since their last dedicated foray into the music of the Congo, 2014’s Congolese Funk, Afrobeat & Psychedelic Rumba 1969-1978, the Analog Africa label returns with another epic collection, Congo Funk! – Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa/Brazzaville 1969 – 1982), a release that owes its origin to a most serendipitous episode.
Following a crate-digging trip by Analog Africa’s founder, Samy Ben Redjeb, to Cotonou, a port city in Benin, where he bought, exclusively, Beninese records, a chance comment by the store’s owner to Samy about the latter’s failure to purchase anything Congolese led to a prolonged stay, the birth of a love for the music of that country and an introduction to around half of the tracks on this compilation.
The Bygones - The Bygones
The Bygones are a Nashville-based indie folk duo comprising Joshua Lee Turner and Allison Young, the Brooklyn. They have a shared love of musical nostalgia that embraces 40s big bands, musicals, jazz, 60s troubadours and indie. So it’s not surprising then that their debut album is a somewhat variegated affair.
With their name capturing their affection for the musical past and the forgive-and-forget nature of many of the songs, The Bygones is a real delight of a debut and the foundation of a bright future ahead.
Ben Nicholls – Duets
As it says on the box, for ‘Duets’, the in-demand double bass player Ben Nicholls has gathered together a glittering array of guests to add vocals to a collection of primarily traditional numbers.
With his bass as the constant in all its different textures, while his contributors add their own shadings, this is a highly immersive and, at times, illuminative listening experience……a great album from a musician whose talents clearly go way beyond that of the sought-after sideman.
Moris Tepper - Building A Nest
Moris Tepper is a man with talent to burn and tales to tell. A songwriter and visual artist, he is probably best known as a guitarist; he started playing with Captain Beefheart in the 1970s, also serving with Tom Waits, Frank Black, Robyn Hitchcock and PJ Harvey.
Fourteen years have passed since the release of his last album, but rather than questioning what took so long, one needs to revel in the variety of musicianship on display across Building A Nest. Over the course of 21 songs, the album twists and turns on a dime, going from heartfelt to heartbroken, mixing intimate folk ballads with cigar-box blues, and stylistically covering everything from bawdy to Beatlesque. It covers more ground than many artists do in a lifetime.
…his life has taken directions far off the beaten path, yet his muse and his music are legendary. Building A Nest adds to that legacy; challenging and charming, it marks a welcome return from a man who has been away from the scene for far too long.
until next time…