Alex Gallacher

Charlie Wheatley has announced “Live at the Chapel”, out 22nd September, the first instalment in a three-part series reworking folk manuscripts from the British Isles through live performance. Recorded live at Stone Nest with two double basses and viola, it holds traditional dance tunes against devotional song, drone and minimalism. The lead single, a set of three tunes, arrives today.

“and remade” is Freda D’Souza’s looping sonic poem, drawn from an installation she built as an act of resistance against enforced clock time. Written across a solstice on a Mersea houseboat and sonified through a solar-powered cassette, each digital download comes with a one-off cyanotype stop-motion film frame.

A new week and a new playlist: ft. Martin Simpson, Mynolia, Shannon Lay, Michael Nau, John Cale & Terry Riley, Bitchin Bajas & Natural Information Society, Alex Dupree, Hannah Everingham, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Laurel Premo, Alejandro Franov, Tucker Zimmerman and lots more.

Morning Rituals & Evening Ragas is a special KLOF Mag playlist that has been quietly growing. It features over 26 hours of primarily instrumental music — 175 artists covering folk, ambient, and experimental genres. It’s long enough to play all day while you work and carry on deep into the night and the next morning.

Declan O’Rourke shares “Echo”, the lead single from his eighth album “Oceanic”, due 16 October. Produced with Jim Moginie of Midnight Oil, it’s a beefy, robust rocker — and its video offers a first look at “Almost With You”, the Australian feature in which O’Rourke makes his screen acting debut, premiering at Galway Film Fleadh on 9 July.

Skyjack’s fourth album, “Let The Sky Open Under Your Feet”, is out today on Kujua Records. The Swiss–South African quintet take the title’s image — feet on the earth, the sky opening below — and turn it into twelve tracks articulating their “deep roots into the earth with high branches reaching upward and outward”.

Our latest Off the Shelf guest is Clàrsach player Anna McLuckie, whose latest release, “The Little Winters”, was one of our recent Featured Albums of the Month. She introduces us to the book she was named after, a pair of aggressively Scottish stools from her Grandad, a map lamp cut from an old Glasgow street map, invaluable notebooks (for the boring and emotional, for songs, poems, and dreams), and more.

KLOF No. 88 brings together new and familiar names across folk, electronic and ambient experimental music. Highlights include Sari Lightman’s solo debut The Way I Saw You, Charlie Franklin’s self-titled EP, Rowena Wise ahead of Bad Things Feel Good*, Alabaster DePlume’s tour-born Dear Children EP, Helen Svoboda’s Headwater, Loma Suyo’s Paloma, Nora Stanley’s debut Glass, and Fen’s debut LP Bor.

Deniz Cuylan shares “No Such Thing,” a gleaming electro-acoustic collaboration with Felbm, alongside an Ade Hanft-directed video — and announces new album “For Luca,” out September 18th via Hush Hush Records. A tribute to his late dog, it turns private grief into communal celebration, with Peni Candra Rini, Thor Harris and Casper Clausen among the friends who feature.

Alex Dupree shares “You’re a Dog, Don’t Talk to Me,” a Michael Hurley cover that features on “Talking to the Dog,” his first album since 2022’s “Thieves,” out August 14th on Scissor Tail Records. His reading carries extra weight this year, following the loss of Michael Hurley back in April.

KLOF premieres “Scared to Love”, the emotional centre of Jason McNiff’s forthcoming tenth album “Ten Blue Songs”, out 28th August on Tombola Records. Stripped-back classical guitar and layered vocals frame a song about staying open-hearted in a culture that rewards distance. “This is the song I nearly threw away,” says McNiff — now one he loves to sing.

Laura Veirs has shared “Pulse”, the latest single from her self-made fourteenth album “Temple Songs”, out 14th August. It builds from nylon-string guitar and bare vocals into bold electric guitar and ‘Filthy’ Lucre’s saxophone, ending on a dissonant duet. The Twixx Williams-directed video sets it in a home gym, with cake, silly string and a nod to Veirs’s weightlifting.