You might think you’re busy, but are you busy like Arnold de Boer of Zea? In addition to being the Ex’s mouthpiece for the past decade and a half, he’s been the singer, guitarist, songwriter, booker, driver, etc., of Zea for 31 years. Throughout that time, the project has continually morphed, operating as a one-man show, a stylistically chameleonic ensemble and a multi-continental, collaborative endeavor that often projects its messages in more than one tongue.
In Lichem Fol Beloften (“a body filled with promises”) is sung entirely in Frisian, the language spoken in de Boer’s northern Netherlands neck of the woods. He wrote some of the lyrics, taking others from poems translated into the dialect. If you get the CD or LP editions,…
Category: alternative folk
Ten years ago, La Tène released their first record, then as a trio with Cyril Bondi, d’Incise, and Alexis Degrenier. A decade, four albums, and multiple collaborations later, the group returns with Moreïne/Déclives — an album that feels as much like a celebration as it does an upheaval. True to its identity, La Tène continues to explore the cracks between tradition and experimentation, between hypnotic drone and repeated gestures, but this time they choose to move onto new ground: the hurdy-gurdy, the group’s emblematic instrument since the very beginning, disappears in favor of a stripped-down setup centered on two electronic percussions and live dub work.
It proves very difficult to tell what is electronic and what isn’t on La Tène’s cavernous and…
Greet, the songwriting project of Matthew Broadley, seems to have a direct line to the weird and the uncanny. Broadley is based in Leeds, a city of half a million people that has developed a reputation for producing musicians with an affinity for desolate and wild landscapes (see also Phil and Layla Legard’s projects, Hawthonn and Xenis Emputae Travelling Band). I Know How to Die is Greet’s debut, and as its title suggests, it is primarily concerned with the darker, doomier corners of traditional music. The album cover’s typeface hints at some kind of pagan darkwave or celtic black metal, and the photography carries the tang of Gallows Pole-style folk horror, and there are elements of all of these things contained within, but the most prominent feature…
If you thought Fleet Foxes’ White Winter Hymnal evoked the feeling of deepest winter, you should check out this beautifully odd and solitary project from Arkansas-based multi-instrumentalist Chaz Knapp to hear how it’s really done. Chaz is a traditional instrumentalist and field recorder, whose Microfolk series highlighted him as a musical collagist. Winter Music contrasts Microfolk (which was recorded in the summer heat) in that Chaz took his instruments to various locations in the rugged terrain of Northwest Arkansas in the depths of winter, recording with tape loops and improvisations while his fingers froze and his nylon string guitar neck shrank in the cold.
The result is something of a remote and isolated audio diary, as much documenting…
Kelby Clark is an LA-by-way-of-Georgia banjo player who blends divergent styles and approaches to forge his own novel direction for the instrument. Over a series of mostly self-released home-spun recordings from the past five or so years, he has honed his approach, expanding the traditions of his point of origin in the American south to include free improvisation and eastern modalities — an alchemy familiar to Sandy Bull, a fellow stretcher of the vocabulary of the banjo and of the concept of “folk” and the traditional. His sparse and appropriately fiery new LP Language of the Torch represents a significant milestone in his development of his own science of the banjo, a statement of intent for his artistic practice.
…Across the seven searching pieces that…
Some combinations are so natural that, in retrospect, you have to ask, “What took them so long to get together?” C Joynes of Cambridgeshire, England and Mike Gangloff of Ironto, Va., have labored separately in substantially similar musical fields. Joynes is a guitarist whose work has drawn inspiration from African and American folk traditions, filtered through early-electric-blues amplification preferences. Gangloff has played fiddle and an armful of other stringed instruments in Pelt, Black Twig Pickers, Eight Point Star and Universal Light, traversing an arc that stretches from old-time mountain music to transcendental electric noise.
Since 2023, they’ve worked together as circumstances allow, touring England,…
Trust a man whose ideal compositional form is the palindrome to reckon with this axiom: Everything comes back to where you started, then you start over again. 2023’s American Landscapes, the last record by Dutch lutenist/multi-instrumentalist Jozef Van Wissem and American guitarist/filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, ground their sound down to the essentials of pealing feedback and patiently cycling lute melodies, then let it sprawl, taking up all available space. After that, what can you do but build things back up?
That’s one gambit that they employ on their new LP. The quivering, e-bowed guitar tones that Jarmusch wraps around gradual progress on The Day The Angels Cried opener “Concerning Celestial Hierarchy” blossom like a chorus of…
This is an accomplished, confident new album from Denver guitarist D. West, who leans more towards the ‘new age’ instrumental guitar stylings of Wiliam Ackerman’s Windham Hill imprint than John Fahey’s American Primitive-defining Takoma.
Rather than the heavily syncopated thumbed technique of Fahey, West’s music often has a playful nature (‘Cult of the Celestial’) and a real sense of technical beauty (‘The Transpacific International Causeway’).
With busy guitar lines showcasing West’s obvious affinity with his instrument and his discovery of the expansive sound of the 12-string, the music often has echoes of Chuck Johnson’s acoustic work, albeit with a tendency towards a free, experimental style in places.
A seminal moment in modern acoustic guitar music is being revisited as Drag City released the 10th-anniversary reissue of Land of Plenty, the spellbinding 2015 debut from duo Bill MacKay & Ryley Walker.
To put things in perspective, 2015 was the same year Walker released his debut follow-up, Primrose Green. MacKay had yet to sign to Drag City (this would happen in 2017 with Esker), but released an album of John Hulburt tunes on Tompkins Square – Sunrise: Bill MacKay Plays the Songs of John Hulburt. Walker was also a Hulburt fan, having co-produced Hulburt’s 1972 private press LP, Opus III, the same year.
…The story of Land of Plenty is one of immediate artistic connection. After first…
Google “Tom Boogizm” and the internet coughs up a blank: a lone Boiler Room set, a now-defunct NTS Radio show, a rarely-tended-to SoundCloud page. A Boomkat one-sheet for Dancin’ in the Streets, the DJ and producer’s latest release under the name Rat Heart, offers precious little clarity, just that he hails from Wigan, a town in the northwest of England. Until recently, the British online music retailer was also the only place one could purchase the record. The likes of Cindy Lee, Alabaster dePlume, and Standing on the Corner have all delayed streaming’s instant gratification with their latest projects, but Dancin’ in the Streets’ relative inaccessibility felt more like a protective measure. Most albums create realms you can enter and exit with a tap; step inside this one, and…
Laments presents four pieces of griefwork that sing connection. Delivered through solo voice and fiddle and rooted in the functional music of lamentation, these wailing songs of few words are not themselves live grief ritual work, but prepared compositions that echo sounds found by the maker performing such rites on herself.
…Following Golden Loam (2021), Laurel Premo’s third solo release bears further evolution of her singular voice in experimental roots, bringing American and Nordic lineages through her own compositions with phenomenal intonation sculpture, her hands and body crafting resonance that physically shakes.
Independent vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and somatic healer Laurel Premo offers a quietly…
Moundabout, the duo consisting of Gnod’s Paddy Shine and Phil Langero (of Los Langeros, Damp Howl and Bisect) release their third album, Goat Skull Table, being a spell for passing between worlds. The album opens with a spectacturaly intense invocation, chanted by Langero, against a background of disturbed electronics which sound like the kind of noises ghost hunters wish they could record: the throbbing of a psychic helicopter, string glitches from the other side, lurching music propelled against its will by malign forces. Langero summons dark spirits in a voice haunted by strange elisions and sudden emphases, as though he’s not in control of what he says. “Come back goat, to this rotting crooown!” he leers. It’s truly terrifying – which is quite an achievement,…
He’s had a most curious career, has Anthony Moore. Now settled in Hastings, he spent decades living an itinerant life across Europe; a member of one of pop’s great trios, Slapp Happy, and a prodigious collaborator, he also seems to value having space and time to work alone. One gets the feeling Moore’s keen both to let some old songs home to roost – On Beacon Hill has him revisiting material from his recorded history with new musician friends – and to push ever forward, with new trios like AKA and OBTRAM3.
Indeed, it can be hard to trace the complex routes Moore has pursued over the decades. After dropping out of art school in Newcastle in the late ’60s, he travelled to the Hebrides, where a chance meeting with experimental film…
Traditional music finds its popular, cosy home in the carol, despite the uncanniness that surrounds the nativity story, and the fraying thread back to the past that each winter brings. A veteran explorer of the season (in 2020’s sparkling Winter Rituals EP with cellist Kate Ellis, and 2022’s starker New Christmas Rituals, with amplified fiddle-playing from André Bosman), Laura Cannell sets out on her best and darkest journey yet here, exploring the time of year when, as she writes on the liner notes, “joy and heartache try to exist together”.
Named after the line in ‘Good King Wenceslas’ before the cruel frosts arrive, Brightly Shone the Moon begins at the organ – a nod to Cannell’s childhood Christmases in the Methodist chapels and churches of Norfolk.
Belarus is not a place necessarily known for its transparency, which is why Krope feels like such an unexpected and extraordinary psychogeographic ramble around a country largely estranged from the rest of Europe.
Anton Anishchanka, field recordist and composer, was pleasantly surprised when he went along to the Institute of Art History, Ethnography and Folklore in Minsk around the time of the pandemic and found he was able to access an archive of field recordings from roughly 1960 to 2005. Thanks to the ethnographer and researcher Iryna Vasilyeva, who works at the institute, Anishchanka managed to retrieve Belarusian folklore songs from various regions, forming the basis of this strangely betwitching album.
Yves Jarvis’s Polaris Prize-winning record, All Cylinders, is expanded upon with 5 extra tracks.
“Polymath” is one of the misused words of music journalism, cousin to the even more hyperbolic “genius”. In pop coverage it usually gets applied to musicians who play more than one instrument and do not fit neatly into a genre bracket — impressive, perhaps, but hardly the same as translating Sumerian while extracting DNA from an apple.
A recipient of this overblown term is Canadian singer-songwriter Yves Jarvis. Born in Montreal as Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet, he plays all the instruments on his new album All Cylinders, which he has also produced. Its songs are filled with switches in direction and doublings back. “If this trail bifurcates, then I just have to choose,”…
In The Far Sound’s latest record, Rick Pedrosa’s guitar strumming seems to reverberate endlessly, as it stretches across canyons and valleys. Even after it ends, it echoes in your mind, redefining the word “expansive.”
Though the band’s name seems to imply a large multi-instrumentalist ensemble, it’s instead a moniker for the Portland, Oregon-based pedal steel guitarist Pedrosa. Like his 2023 self-titled LP, The Far Sound’s latest release, To Heart, To Earth, could be filed in a record store under movie scores, TV soundtracks and ambient music. However, within these nine songs on his latest release, Pedrosa refines and deepens his sound through more improvisation, varied instrumentation and groove-centric music.
The architects of modern fingerstyle guitar built their temple with steel. Sure, you have your Bola Setes, your Tashi Dorjis, the odd occasion Six Organs of Admittance would reach for a nylon-string; but the vast majority of fingerpickers walking in John Fahey’s footsteps seem to have felt similarly as Robbie Basho, who once claimed that while the classical guitar may be fit for more romantic songs, steel-strings had the “fire.” Mason Lindahl, however, would beg to differ: He plays his classical guitar as if he were blowing out the final embers of some cave-dwelling flame, then tracing the smoke as it dances through the air. His music is stark yet warm, swirling yet still, violent yet hauntingly gentle.
Lindahl has remained an elusive figure in…
Collaborative albums are a tricky undertaking that can often result in clunky material that tries too hard to appeal to two separate audiences.
In the case of Chat Pile and Hayden Pedigo, however, In the Earth Again showcases a seamless connection of artists that appear to be on polar-opposite ends of the sonic spectrum, while simultaneously showcasing a logical next step in the band’s trajectory.
From the very start, Pedigo’s guitar playing fits right into the Chat Pile universe. Dreamy instrumental opener of “Outside” and onward, his finger-picking style conjures imagery of a dusty, desolate rural American landscape — a familiar concept, both lyrically and sonically, for the band. (Pedigo grew up in the Texas Panhandle,…
Night CRIÚ evokes clandestine ceremonies in forest glades, covert rituals taking place in the depths of a cave. Crepuscular and ghostly, this is a realm where an intoned, reverberant voice meshes with ritualistic choirs, undulating brass, methodically bowed strings and unhurried percussion.
Musically, the lineage could be the solo work of Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard or Anna von Hausswolff at her most reductive. If the fifth solo album from the Ireland’s Hilary Woods were employed as the soundtrack to the 1967 Czech film Marketa Lazarová or Werner Herzog’s 1976 Herz aus Glas, it would be a seamless transposition – this music exists beyond place and time.
For Woods, getting to this point has not been linear. From 1999, she was the bassist of…