Alex Gallacher

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.

SML have shared a live video of “The Drums”, the A-side of their new album “Spontaneous Music Live” on International Anthem. Filmed by Charlie Weinmann at Zebulon in LA, it captures one of two side-length improvisations recorded uncut to analogue tape — the band working through an idea in real time, with nowhere to hide.

Emily Portman shares a live video of “Fox’s Song”, a track from her album “Dominion of Spells”, filmed at Moonko in Sheffield. Inspired by a Siberian folk tale, it casts its narrator as a shape-shifting woman-fox, exploring feminism, midlife change and the pull towards a wilder form of life. Portman (voice, banjo) is joined by Louis Campbell and Lucy Revis.

This week’s Monday Morning Brew playlist is an extra-long one, featuring Minna, who hails from the Scottish Borders and is new to KLOF Mag, plus Captain Beefheart, Zach Romeo, Esther Rose, Sham, Huw Marc Bennett, Ed Askew, Hana Stretton, The Kossoy Sisters, Frankie Archer, Sessa, The Brudi Brothers and more.

Our latest Off the Shelf guest is Johnny Bell, whose album “Mountain States” expands mountain music beyond Appalachia to the Rocky Mountains of the American West. From a vintage western revolver lamp to a family heirloom lap steel and banjo finger picks, his ten objects sit close to the music — and the high desert home — that shaped them.

Laura Cannell launches her new monthly Sound Hoard series with “Echoes of a Swan Bone Flute”, out now on Brawl Records, and accompanied by a Simon Nunn film. Inspired by swan-bone flutes from the 13th–15th centuries displayed at Norwich Castle, she performs on overbow and octave violin, bass recorder and synths.