Gareth Thompson

KLOF Mag’s Gareth Thompson chats to Pneumatic Tubes, aka Jesse Chandler (Midlake and Mercury Rev), about his new album ‘Runner’s High’, referencing “a feeling you can’t get on drugs.” He shares that when he started running, “It coincided with the birth of my first child, my daughter Nico. It’s strange that my dad began running when my mom was pregnant with me.”

We caught-up with Marlon Williams to chat about his remarkable new record ‘Te Whare Tīwekaweka’, the first album sung in Māori by a solo artist to chart at number one in his native New Zealand.

With Te Whare Tīwekaweka, Marlon Williams turns to the Māori tongue of his ancestors for inspiration. In nurturing his cultural and spiritual ties, Williams has found a way into his most expansive and majestic album yet.

The performances on Bridget Hayden’s ‘Cold Blows the Rain’ are spellbinding. It’s an album as distinct and vivid as its characters are dark and illusory.

A Syrian American guitarist and teacher based in Chicago, Rami Atassi’s ‘New & Ancient Christmas Music’ is a radiant and rhythmic set that also reminds us that global connections endure in the message of goodwill.

Jeremie Albino’s Our Time In The Sun, his first for Dan Auerbach’s label Easy Eye Sound, is the stuff of jukebox diners, a singalong soundtrack to nights of pain and passion…it’s also huge on melodic pleasantries. 

Jake Blanchard has made a union with the divine on Fermentation. It’s an album with the whomp of Elkhorn and the godliness of Tuluum Shimmering. Think of sound waves being dosed out to herbal plants. Close your eyes and drown in its wyrd bliss.

London-based artist Cassie Kinoshi will present a specially curated programme alongside the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on Thursday, 21st November 2024. Kinoshi’s regular band seed. will also perform at the show entitled Nature’s HEART

On Still + Bright, Amythyst Kiah’s iron-willed music is full of immortal longings, her strident voice radiating warmth and magick. At times, she sounds like a sensual figure going on epic quests, with groove-steeped melodies big enough to span oceans…throughout, she expresses great divinity.

Featuring the VOX Sydney Philharmonia Choir, and recorded in a nineteenth century Gothic church in Sydney, The Undreamt-of Centre is Laurence Pike’s defining achievement, a work that both glorifies the past and haunts the contemporary.

Taylor McCall has released The Porch Sessions EP. McCall says, “The Porch Sessions are an intimate batch of outdoor recordings done with myself and Sean McConnell. I wanted to break down the artificial veils of the studio and bring the listeners onto my porch.”

Leyla McCalla talks to KLOF Mag about her new record, Sun Without the Heat. “…these songs were about transformation and what it takes to create change on a personal or macroscopic societal level. That’s reflected in the changes in my own life…”

Awen Ensemble’s Cadair Idris presents proof that not only wooden instruments conjure a response to wilderness lands or scenic rivers. Woven from modern jazz repertoires with a mythic folk essence, this is an audacious and promising debut.

Listening to ‘gratitude’, the latest album from Cassie Kinoshi’s seed., requires some investment of both mind and spirit. Made from the raw materials of Kinoshi’s life, gratitude overflows with harmony and clarity.

Oisín Leech’s Cold Sea is an album of rapt meditations on life and love, set against the wild Irish landscape. These are songs that flow placidly, broodingly, leaving the listener awed into silence.

Released this month on Mississippi Records, Souvenirs is a lost and found recording of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, on which supple flowing vocal melodies meet irregular piano phrasing as Emahoy’s hands roam freely. It’s an amazing hoard of personal, spiritual and national yearnings.

Muireann Bradley is a new Celtic soul sister, and with ‘I Kept These Old Blues’, she swings the blues back from the margins. More vitally, she could inspire a fresh generation to investigate the genre.

On ‘Our Roots Run Deep‘, Dominique Fils-Aimé offers a humanist side to healing where mind, soul and body connect to word, rhythm and imagery. It’s an album that dreams in lush colours, a stunning work of folk-magic and fellowship.