KLOF Mag Regular Newsletter
Sam Amidon, David Allred, Julie Fowlis, Bridget Hayden, Tartine de Clous, Ed Askew, Bill Orcutt, Mulatu Astake, Richard Dawson, Alex Rex, Folklore Tapes and more.
Artist of the Month: Sam Amidon
We kicked off 2025 with a new Artist of the Month, namely Sam Amidon, whose new album, Salt River, his first for Rough Trade’s folk imprint River Lea Records, drops on 24th January.
KLOF Mag’s Danny Neill gave us an insight into the album through his review, and an interview with Sam will be up on KLOF Mag for you to read tomorrow.
“Salt River is deep, but it will not give you the full kaleidoscopic experience if you only dip your toes in the water; this one demands a deep dive followed by a long lingering emersion and, best of all, when you climb out, you may just find yourself hungry to explore different music of varying shapes and colours. With a range like this, Sam Amidon can open so many doors. Eclectic is an easily applied word, but here we have an artist releasing a groundbreaking, spirited and adventurous album that is genuinely worthy of the description.”
Salt River (24th January 2025) River Lea
pre-Order: https://samamidon.rtrecs.co/saltriver
Also Featured on KLOF Mag
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David Allred – The Beautiful World
The piece around which the album revolves, Oh, Lauren, is the closest Allred gets to a conventionally structured song. It’s also the album’s most potent and humanising moment, when the listener is drawn closest to the grief at the heart of its creation. It’s almost as if all the other tracks on the album are points of light radiating off this one song, moving in different directions, towards different emotions and different possible outcomes. And that is where Allred’s gift lies: he can draw together and then disentangle a whole skein of varying strands, following each one to its logical conclusion and giving each one exactly the time and space it needs to develop its own personality. The result is an album whose quiet power is little short of amazing. It confronts grief with courage and respect, and provides a fitting tribute to its subject.
We also premiered the video for David Allred’s new single ‘Look’, described by Blake as one of the album’s “folky moments…with its gorgeous acoustic guitar bubbling under a saturated vocal. It hints at Phil Elverum-style confessional.” Alongside the single, Allred has released a self-made video featuring VHS footage from his childhood, which he described as an incredibly cathartic project to create.
He says, “The way we find love, hope and beauty in a world monitored by our tech overlords who we find escape from, in the things directly in front of us. Like romance and pizza.”
The video was made by David Allred and Fay Funk. Home video clips filmed by Rich Allred.
Bridget Hayden and The Apparitions – Cold Blows the Rain
The song cycle here might raise eyebrows for some obvious choices. And when taking on the crown jewels of folk music, you’d best be sure to offer fresh intrigue. It’s a gamble either way – fail and face charges of lacking originality, succeed and have your impeccable source material to thank. In this case, it’s a success because the performances are so spellbinding that they wipe your memory clean of most other versions. It’s an album as distinct and vivid as its characters are dark and illusory.
Hayden is accompanied by the surefire duo of Sam McLoughlin on harmonium and Dan Bridgewood-Hill on violin, both known as The Apparitions herein. Apparitions indeed, for the spectres of lovers lost or deceived haunt this collection remorselessly. It’s like you know that ghosts don’t exist, but Hayden shows you them anyway. Her voice has a penetrating power, yet she often sings within herself for sirenic effect. The album’s sonic force is like a meeting of June Tabor, Laura Cannell and Alison Cotton.
Tartine de Clous – Compter Les Dents
UK audiences may be aware of the work of Tartine de Clous through their 2018 live album Au Cube (Okraina Records), recorded in Bristol with Alasdair Roberts and Neil McDermott. That record was a revelation, tingling with live energy and the spirit of collaboration, and anyone who used it as a springboard to discover their first – and until now only – studio album would not have been disappointed. Sans Folklore (2015) opened up a beguiling world of traditional Francophone song, performed unaccompanied (or occasionally with a background drone) and recorded largely on the hoof: in bars, around tables, in the street, and with all the accompanying background noise that those situations dictated. The intention was to create a ‘veillée’ or vigil, where music exists in a real and physical human context. The result was a music that reached into the past but sounded grippingly present.
Compter Les Dents was less peripatetic in its creation than Sans Folklore, but the idea of music as something other than performance or recording session persists. These songs come from the Vendée department on France’s Atlantic coast and were apparently found in an old shoebox. The trio recorded them nearly six years ago around a table in a friend’s house; their existence seems to say that song can be as habitual as eating breakfast or chatting about the football. As habitual and as necessary as breath, even.
Like Au Cube, Compter Les Dents is released on the ever-reliable Brussels-based label Okraina, who are doing their best to scour the wilder shores of music. Like the bands they work with, Okraina do things their own way, releasing their albums on 10-inch vinyl with beautifully designed sleeves by Gwénola Carrère. They have a kind of outsider appeal, unwilling to compromise on quality and seemingly unswayed by commercial concerns. Tartine de Clous must now be regarded as one of their flagship bands. They are certainly one of the most talented and interesting.
Julie Fowlis, Éamon Doorley, Zoë Conway & John Mc Intyre – Allt Vol. II: Cuimhne
The music of geographically distinct places (often with common elements within national boundaries) is, of course, the source of much of our musical nourishment, but migration and travel to find work has also led to extensive inter-mingling of songs, poetry and music, not least within the British Isles. Such musical merging has particularly been the case between the musical traditions of Ireland and Scotland, and Julie Fowlis, Éamon Doorley, Zoë Conway & John Mc Intyre – augmented on this occasion by the ubiquitous Dónal Lunny (playing bouzouki and bodhran, and co-producing) – represent a deeply rewarding and inventive sharing of those traditions. Allt Vol. II: Cuimhne, which means a memory, follows six years after their lauded, eponymous debut
After watching the quartet at Celtic Connections in 2022, a performance in which they were “perfectly matched in every combination,” their second album more than cements that view: it is harmonious in every aspect—magnificent vocals, classy musicianship, and absorbing airy arrangements.
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The latest Brew featured The Burning Hell, RK Nagati, The Cosmic Tones Research Trio, Yo La Tengo, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Loma, Leong Lau, Piero Umiliani, Hermanos Guitiérrez, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Jeff Tweedy & Claire Rousay, Six Organs of Admittance, Clara Mann, Don Cherry, Immersion & SUSS, Abel Ghekiere, Echolalia, Dashiell Hedayat, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy & John Anderson, Bridget Hayden & The Apparitions, Rosie Miles, James P Honey, Damien Jurado, Ya Tseen & Samantha Crain, Ngozi Family, and Pharoah Sanders.
Bridget Hayden/Daniel Weaver – Ceremonial County Series Vol.XI – Shropshire | Nottinghamshire
Thomas Blake continues his extensive review of the Ceremonial County Series from Folklore Tapes.
The latest counties to get the special treatment are Shropshire and Nottinghamshire, with Bridget Hayden responsible for the former and Daniel Weaver the latter.
Hayden has been at the forefront of the north of England’s experimental music scene for a while now. A founder-member of Leeds-based drone maximalists Vibracathedral Orchestra, she has since become a protean outsider and purveyor of the strange, dabbling in everything from improvisation to textured noise rock to stripped-back traditional folk song.
Weaver’s side of the tape – Ghosts of the Meadows, Sneiton and Forest Fields – eschews the common ground of legend and myth in favour of a more personal interpretation of a theme. He uses the idea of ghosts to examine attitudes towards death: his fifteen-minute slot finds room for both terror and comfort.
Both of these pieces are entirely wordless, and yet they both convey striking and very different stories: Hayden’s mythic and haunting, Weaver’s inevitable and personal. Rarely can so much have been said, and so eloquently, in half an hour of instrumental music.
Legendary outsider psych-folk musician, painter and poet Ed Askew dies at age 84
The legendary outsider psych-folk musician, painter and poet Ed Askew passed away at the weekend (4th January 2025), he was 84 years old.
Ed released his first album, Ask the Unicorn, in 1968 after graduating from Yale. He became a well-known face thanks to his performances at poetry events and his unusual choice of instrument, a tiple, which was similar in size to a baritone ukulele and had ten steel strings in four courses. The album has been described as an “acid folk” masterpiece and one of the most singular releases from the infamous and historic ESP-Disk catalogue.
Also, read Tom Blake’s poem about Ed Askew – ‘He Is 82 Years Old Now’. Ed, an outsider folk musician, poet and painter, passed away recently; Tom called him “one of the finest, most big-hearted, most underappreciated songwriters of his or anyone else‘s generation.” Read it here.
Bill Orcutt – How to Rescue Things
Experimental guitar improviser Bill Orcutt’s Music for Four Guitars album, where he wrote and tracked four spiky guitar parts for each song, was pretty damn successful and spawned several live Bill Orcutt Quartet tours, with Ava Mendoza, Wendy Eisenberg and Shane Parish completing the band. In a shift in style but still somehow vaguely in keeping with the Four Guitars album comes How to Rescue Things, which sees Bill playing his four-string Telecaster over recordings of old RCA easy listening music, a sound drenched in strings and harps. So yes, although Bill cheekily but correctly keeps the credits to simply ‘Bill Orcutt: guitar’ on the album’s reverse, this is his orchestral strings album, a move that could be tongue in cheek or passion project; tricky to figure out with this mercurial, humorous musician.
Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra –Tension
Although he is now in his 81st year, Mulatu Astake, the pioneer of Ethio-jazz, is not slowing down. His latest album, Tension, clearly shows that his appetite for pushing his musical envelope in new directions has not diminished.
Like all good musicians, Mulato Astatke has refused to let his music stagnate; his Ethio-jazz style continues to evolve and travel along fresh paths in original directions. Tension is a vibrant, uplifting listen, the musicianship is of the highest order, and the chemistry between its participants is palpable throughout.
Richard Dawson shares new song and video “Gondola”
Taken from his new album, Richard Dawson shares ‘Gondola’ video, which features Jenny Coverack miming his words and reflecting on life—past, present, and future – a portrait so vivid, it’s totally genius.
Alex Rex shares new single and video Psychic Rome
Alex Rex has today shared his new single Psychic Rome which is accompanied by a music video created by Tom Chick who has worked with Alex in the past. The single is being released via The Barne Society, an independent label based in Scotland which operates as a cottage industry, producing and releasing music via The Barne Studio.
Alex wrote that it: “…shares his interest in the corridor of time around the birth of Christ where the Roman Empire was at its most glorious and depraved. As Ted Hughes writes in his introduction to Ovid’s Metamorphosis ‘“’For all its Augustan stability, it was a sea of hysteria and despair. At one extreme wallowing in the bottomless appetites and sufferings of the gladiatorial arena, and at the other searching higher and higher for a spiritual transcendence.’ It also has a gnarly riff.”
Alex is joined by Rory Haye on guitar, Lavinia Blackwall on organ and Marco Rea on bass.
More soon.