KLOF Mag Regular Newsletter
Leyla McCalla, Martin Simpson, Oren Ambarchi, Kiran Leonard, Shane Parish, James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg, Iron and Wine, New Playlist and more.
Below are some of the recent highlights from KLOF Mag - klofmag.com. Due to the length of the articles, links are included to the full interviews, reviews, videos etc.
Mixtapes and Playlists
Our latest Monday Morning Brew Playlist is out today, featuring Marta Del Grandi, Joyce Moreno, Pascal Gamboni, Groupe Kounabeli de Musuku & Patience Dabany, Nduduzo Makhathini, Ricardo Dias Gomes/Domenico Lancellotti, James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg, Nils Berg Cinemascope, Rozini Pátkai, Enji, SUSS, Floreana and more. Listen on Spotify | Apple Music
Save the playlist to get a new playlist every Monday.
Our latest Mixtape, went out to Premium Subscribers recently and features two tracks from recently discovered recordings of Anne Briggs from 1971 (more below). Topic Records were kind enough to let us share these tracks ahead of Record Store Day. There’s also new music from Martin Simpson, Olivia Chaney, Magic Tuber Stringband, Richard Thompson and more.
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Leyla McCalla
In her own words, Leyla McCalla has been having a super interesting day. Speaking to KLOF Mag from a sunlit Airbnb in Richmond, Virginia, she relates some intriguing news. “I’m working on a project about African American burial grounds in Richmond,” she says. “I’m an artist in residence at the university here. Today I’ve been meeting the most interesting historians, photojournalists, newspaper editors and writers, filling me in on all this history. It’s gonna make some kind of song cycle, but I’m still figuring out how it will look.”
McCalla’s albums to date have often had an underlying theme, ranging from the poetry of Langston Hughes, through political satires to subversive Haitian broadcasters. For her new record, Sun Without the Heat, she draws more directly upon personal experience. McCalla says, “With some distance now, I’m seeing these songs were about transformation and what it takes to create change on a personal or macroscopic societal level. That’s reflected in the changes in my own life – becoming a mother, a wife, a divorcee, a business owner. Part of being an artist is that deep commitment to turning ourselves inside out to make new work. When I wrote these songs I was coming from a place where my grandfather had just passed away. I also lost my brother a couple of years ago.”
Martin Simpson Interview and Off the Shelf
Skydancers (reviewed here), Martin Simpson’s wonderful new solo album, is in many ways in keeping with his last project, Nothing but Green Willow with Thomm Jutz, in that the music is almost economical, with nary a wasted note. “Nothing but Green Willow was fantastically economical in many ways,” Martin agrees. “When I think about how we did it and how long it took to do it, it was economical. But then I was straight back into this solo record, which is very much a creature of two halves. First you have the live album, which I’m absolutely delighted with. I’m never happier than when playing live, and I’ve never felt more on top of that than I do at the moment, which is really interesting. So there’s the live stuff and then the other CD, which is me and my pals.”
The amount of guest musicians on the studio album is modest, but the quality is top-drawer, with bass stalwart Ben Nicholls, guitar virtuoso Louis Campbell, Andy Cutting and Liz Hanks, joined by backing singers and pedal steel legend Greg Leisz. “It was just lovely to do and they’re all such good musicians,” Martin smiles. “I got Greg to play pedal steel through Jackson Browne, because Jackson and I get on really well and I really like what he does. So I asked Jackson if he could sing harmonies on [Woody Guthrie song] Deportee, like he did on Louisiana 1927 from Prodigal Son. But the issue was it was in exactly the key he would sing in, so there was nowhere for him to go. However, Greg plays in Jackson’s band, so Jackson recorded Greg on Deportee and New Harmony, which was great, because he’s the boss.”
We move on to talk about the title track, which is an important song both on the album and in general. “The song is a part of everything that was going on at the time of making this record,” Martin tells us. “Skydancers was a commission and I was incredibly delighted to write it for Chris Packham; he is a very important human being, not just as a television presenter, but as a man who speaks really well for humanity. If there were more Chris Packhams about, I would feel more confident of the survival of the world.”
Martin Simpson was also our latest ‘Off the Shelf’ guest. In this series, we ask artists to present objects from a shelf or shelves in their homes and talk about them. Find out what he keeps on his shelves here.
Editor’s Choice - Reviews
Oren Ambarchi / Johan Berthling / Andreas Werliin – Ghosted II
Australian composer and guitarist Oren Ambarchi had a hand in two of the best albums of 2022. Solo effort Shebang was defined by flourishes of intricate, jazzy guitar and a compositional sense that drew from sources as diverse as twentieth-century minimalism, Miles Davis and IDM. This was preceded by Ghosted, on which Ambarchi was joined by a rhythm section of Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin, and whose four tracks grew from a minimal percussive framework to encompass post-rock structures, ambient soundscapes, alien grooves and subtle melodic progressions. These albums felt like twin highlights in a thirty-year career, which has never been anything less than boundary-pushing, so it’s a pleasure to report that the trio who created Ghosted has returned with a sequel of sorts.
Ghosted II, like its predecessor and Shebang, is made up of four meaty tracks. As before, they are numbered from one to four, but this time round in Swedish.
Kiran Leonard – Real Home
Kiran Leonard has been quietly getting on with things for over a decade now, garnering endorsements from The Quietus, The Guardian and Pitchfork without ever bothering the ears of mainstream music fans. His talent as a writer and composer is something of an open secret; his releases are unanimously well-received by critics and peers – including bands like Black Country New Road, on whom he is an acknowledged influence – but he sticks doggedly to an admirable ethos of DIY experimentalism which perhaps precludes commercial success but makes for consistently excellent, compellingly multifaceted recordings.
Leonard’s go-to sound is a kind of orchestrated clatter, complex but freewheeling, and it is perfectly exemplified by the first moments of Real Home’s opening track, Pass Between Houses, where layers of percussion and noise give way to taut post-rock. It establishes the album as a distinctly urban piece of work, specifically a tangential ode to London.
Shane Parish – Repertoire
Repertoire, a hot release from Bill Orcutt’s Palilalia label, sees guitar intellectual Shane Parish flex across fourteen cover songs arranged for acoustic guitar inside a tidy thirty-two minutes, a detail very much in keeping with Bill’s own music, which never outstays its welcome. For those unfamiliar with Shane, he is a prolific player, arranger and educator of the guitar, his most notable outfits being instrumental trio Ahleuchatistas and Bill’s guitar quartet (Shane also transcribed Music for Four Guitars to tab, which is part of the download). Here, he goes it alone, and the resulting set is quietly satisfying and the playing subtly virtuosic.
There are many points of interest here, and Shane unsurprisingly unleashes several styles and shades across the album, but Serenade to a Cuckoo is a wonderful starting point. Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s flute tune transfers beautifully to guitar, with Shane’s arpeggio intro and sympathetic main body slowing things down and creating a tune that actually works better than the original. There are shades of Glenn Jones’s Everything Ends, the best song from The Giant who ate Himself here, which is no bad thing.
Ariel Sharratt, Matthias Kom, Shotgun Jimmie – Hardly Working
The Burning Hell have probably got an absolutely brilliant unreleased song somewhere or other about how they’re not a cult band. Mathias Kom and Ariel Sharratt don’t seem like the kind of people who would appreciate being put into one of those reductive little boxes, but they do seem like they’d write something scathing, self-deprecating and mordantly funny about it. Cult band or not, they’ve got that kind of following: once you’ve heard a couple of their songs, it’s hard to be a casual fan. The songwriting is so clever and so close to the bone that once you get it, you’re infected for life. And they are doing their cult status no harm at all by teaming up with fellow Canadian Shotgun Jimmie, a musician and interdisciplinary artist who brings a kind of DIY surrealism to the Manitoba indie scene.
The Hardly Working EP follows on from Ariel Sharratt & Mathias Kom’s 2020 album Never Work, which explored the self-consuming nature of late-stage capitalism through the eyes of those at the coalface: depressed office workers, anti-establishment arsonists, revolutionary robots. Coming as it did in the midst of the Covid lockdown, that album felt almost accidentally prescient, but its message is just as meaningful now, if not more so, which might explain why Kom and Sharratt have decided to re-release it and give it a proper tour. The accompanying EP serves as a kind of jolt, a software update for your phone that you never knew you needed but which turns out to be genuinely useful.
James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg – All Gist
It was only in January that James Elkington last dropped a record, the wonderfully idiosyncratic Me Neither, a twenty-nine-song project chronicling a month of improvisations, one being created per day. For All Gist, his third collaboration with the always classy and discerning Nathan Salsburg (whose last release was the haunting Landwerk No.3 in January 2023), the pair demonstrate with fluid, confident playing why they are such a solid duo.
These ten songs were cut during two three-day sessions in Chicago, and the feeling from the finished article is of a pain-free process, with the playing across the board being deceptively relaxed and unassuming. But, of course, there is plenty of chops and prowess hidden beneath the surface.
Michael Feuerstack – Eternity Mongers
For more than ten years now and a good couple of decades before as Snailhouse, Montreal artist Michael Feuerstack has built a dependable reputation for producing delicate, thoughtful and literate songs. On ‘Eternity Mongers’ he has deliberately tried to push himself out of his comfort zone, boldly looking for fresh sounds and recording methods whilst holding on to the qualities that marked him out as a unique voice in songwriting to start with. It is all still there, that appropriately deft touch on the guitar, a singing voice with a grain of authenticity, and a mastery of lyrics that reward repeated listens, but now his momentum is an inherent sense of wonder and playful curiosity at the mysteries of life. And, like all the best songwriters, he is not looking to pin any definitive answers to the wall, instead aiming to trigger some responses in the listener, to tease out the questions in their minds and side-saddle them along within their thoughts and moments.
Leyla McCalla – Sun Without The Heat
In his review of Leyla McCalla’s 2022 release for KLOF Mag, Thomas Blake stated, “There are moments of pain all over Breaking The Thermometer.” In a coincidental piece of verbal synchronicity, Leyla herself says of her latest release, Sun Without The Heat, “I found myself exploring the pain and tension of transformation through some of my earliest musical influences”. The listener could be forgiven, then, for assuming that the album might be somewhat downbeat, one replete with the ache of suffering, misery and torment. In reality, however, whilst the music does indeed take in the sadness and sorrow associated with the normality of life, both personal and collective, it is far from all being gloom and despair, with Leyla balancing the darker moments with light, incorporating fun, exuberant and celebratory sounds.
Iron and Wine – Light Verse
In some ways, listening to Iron and Wine’s Light Verse feels more like reading a novel. You get caught up in the details of Sam Beam’s characters. New lessons turn up, and along the way, you find yourself wrapped up in places you never thought you’d be. All of which is interesting since there was a point where Beam wasn’t sure this album would ever come to pass. During the pandemic, domesticity replaced songwriting and recapturing the musical mode took a while. After tentative steps recording LORI, an EP of Lori McKenna covers, he found himself getting back on track.
Recorded in Laurel Canyon largely because all the people he wanted to use lived out there, Beam’s seventh album is a most surprising concoction. Light Verse traverses times and tides, crafting something with musical and lyrical ideas that sound like they should be in a constant state of chaos.
Ben Glover – And The Sun Breaks Through The Sky
It’s been six years since Ben Glover’s last solo album (Shorebound), with his most recent release being the Sweet Wild Lily EP in 2020. And The Sun Breaks Through The Sky found him taking a slower and more considered approach. Creating music for himself rather than being at the mercy of the usual album cycle, the production process for the album began in 2019, allowing the music to develop organically without heed to some external agenda. The result, with an underlying theme of home, is a top-notch addition to an already outstanding catalogue.
Co-produced with Dylan Alldredge, with assorted co-writers and guest musicians, longtime collaborator Neilson Hubbard among them, And The Sun Breaks Through The Sky opens with the simple strummed sway of Make My Way Home, featuring Jaimee Harris on backing and Johnny Duke on electric guitar. It’s a song about finding peace and roots…
New Music Highlights
Japanese sound artist FUJI||||||||||TA returns to Hallow Ground with his second full-length MMM for the Swiss label, his most complex so far–a masterpiece of conceptual and formal rigour. More
Malin Lewis, the pioneering queer bagpiper, fiddler, instrument maker and composer, releases their debut album Halocline next month. Watch the stunningly scenic video for their third album single, Hiraeth. The album is inspired by European folk traditions, human nature, queerness and the universe. More
Jake Xerxes Fussell announces his new album and Fat Possum debut ‘When I’m Called’. Listen to his lead single, the traditional song ‘Going to Georgia’, sourced from an Art and Margo Rosenbaum Folkways anthology. It’s truly heavenly. More
Taken from his new album “Ship to Shore”, Richard Thompson shares his new single ‘Freeze’ – “Oh, for heaven’s sake, do something. Forwards, backwards, sideways, anything. There is nothing to fear but fear itself… no, I take it back, it’s all terrifying choices. Good luck.” More
Taken from her forthcoming new album Mayday, Myriam Gendron shares her new single Terres brûlées. “This song represented one of the biggest writing challenges I’ve ever faced…I had to pull out all the stops, dare to be lyrical, pretend I was Baudelaire or Léo Ferré!” More.
Taken from his new album Locust Land, listen to Bill MacKay’s new single ‘Keeping In Time’, which finds MacKay employing a searching voice to explore themes of fate and love. He has also announced a UK date at London’s Café OTO on 4th September. More
Canadian experimental singer-songwriter Ora Cogan announces her new album ‘Formless’ and shares new single/video “Cowgirl” – it’s like having David Lynch turning up to your college gig with a Super 8. More
Placenta is the fourth collection of Carlos Niño & Friends albums to be released by International Anthem in the last four years. Listen to the lead single Love to all Doulas! More
This month sees the release of Paul Duane’s Folk Horror film ‘All You Need Is Death’, the score for which was created by Ian Lynch of Lankum. The album is available to stream from today ahead of the film’s release on 19th April. More
Eiko Ishibashi was again reunited with Japanese Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi to score his eco-drama Evil Does Not Exist. The film score will be released on Drag City in June and features Eiko’s longtime partner, Jim O’Rourke, on guitar. Listen to the lead single, ‘Smoke’. More
Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada has announced his first full-length solo album ‘What Is Not Strange?’ and shares impressionistic video by Dicky Bahto for ‘Grand Trine’. The album explores the themes of being alive, mortality, and finding one’s place in the world. More
Irish Quartet Landless, featuring Lily Power, Méabh Meir, Ruth Clinton and Sinéad Lynch, announce new album ‘Lúireach’ and share video for The Fisherman’s Wife – a song written by Ewan MacColl for the 1960 BBC Radio Ballad ‘Singing the Fishing’. More
Bonny Light Horseman announce their Jagjaguwar debut album, ‘Keep Me on Your Mind/See You Free,’ and share their first music video, “I Know You Know.” The song’s feel-good, breezy melody and anthemic chorus contrast with its devastating refrain. More
Until next time