Demi Spriggs is hard to pin down. Splitting time between Athens and London, she trades as an artist, ethnographer, and doctoral candidate while also doing publishing and editing. None of which prepares you for a boy called ear. It’s an EP that traffics in both delighting and confusing, sometimes in equal measure.
The sound is fragile and folky, with an acoustic guitar and her voice dominating the mix. Illustrating her ties to the tradition, holding fair opens with a brief unaccompanied offering of Scarborough Fair singing “Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” before moving on to the plucked and eventually strummed lyrics that lean into something considerably less traditional.
Singing with a high, slightly haunted voice, a tale of love and sadness mines traditional sounds as the song slows to a virtual crawl. Throughout, she creates a framework where each song works as a sonic continuation of the last, which demands an uncanny devotion to detail. Despite the strong folk overtones, subtle jazz influences creep into her delivery.
Rather than performing songs that exist outside of time, they seem to be haunted by the ghosts of what has gone before; this is best heard on if you don’t say it, the wheat will, whose guitar playing and singing border on the spectral, the guitar lending a strong traditional feel. The introduction of what sounds like a second guitar is used to set up the transition to escalator jazz; the playing wanders eerily around the edges of a world one wasn’t expecting. Initially, the song feels out of place, yet as one listens, it feels more like the other songs are all being played simultaneously.
Spriggs seems to occupy the fringes as an artist whose bio states she has “participated in a number of arts collectives between Athens and London and is a member of a rolling performance group based in Vienna.” While Spriggs may be influenced by tradition, she is not, as the first three songs this EP may suggest, anchored by it. Conversely, while she lives in a modern world, her music seems tied to the past, which makes it feel traditional and modern, otherworldly and haunting, mysterious and melancholic, intriguing and exciting.