Gareth Thompson

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.

We catch up with JUNO Award-winning singer-songwriter and plant-loving Dominique Fils-Aimé at her Montreal apartment to talk about her fourth album, Our Roots Run Deep, an album themed around greenness and rebirth – and the first in a new trilogy.

An emotive blend of song and oratory, Blind Boys Of Alabama’s “Echoes of the South” seeks the core of Divine-human relationships. No simplistic pleas for salvation; these are stories of how we might live when facing hardship or the loss of hope.

Pat Gubler, aka P.G. Six, chats to Folk Radio about his new album ‘Murmurs & Whispers’ – the artwork, songs and themes, Irish harp, folk music (including Maddy Prior, Bert Jansch and John Renbourn), collaborating with Sharron Kraus and more.

The music on ‘Playing for the Man at the Door – Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958–1971’ is totally engrossing – wild wolflike blues, red in tooth and clawhammer; rawness and reality, without the spit and polish of record label recordings.

With Bark Out Thunder Roar Out Lightning, Chief Adjuah presents a forceful, sometimes brutal, album filled with rhythms that overlap and overload the senses. Rarely have sound and heritage been so forcefully joined as on this divine ruckus of an album.

Like a prophet in exile, Beverly Glenn-Copeland sends us messages of love, hope and resistance on ‘The Ones Ahead’, his first major album in two decades. What finer witness could we seek right now?