Thomas Blake

In the hands of Jonathan Nangle and the Crash Ensemble, something beautiful has emerged from the long gestation of ‘Blue Haze of Deep Time’, which should become a touchstone of the ‘slow music’ movement.

Folklore Tapes deliver one of the strongest and strangest in their Ceremonial County series. The Bohman Brothers provide the perfect primer for creating weird, place-specific atmospheres, while Jennifer Reid represents folk music as a living tradition, as entertaining as it is political.

New Thing, the scarily accomplished debut album from Avery Friedman, inhabits a complex emotional realm where nervousness can coexist with (and inform) ideas of sexiness, sadness, tenderness. Her world is fragile but appears to have arrived fully-formed.

Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes is proof that you don’t have to forsake traditional aesthetic notions of melody to make something experimental…this is music deep and alluring enough to get lost in and sparse enough to find yourself in. 

Macie Stewart’s ‘When the Distance is Blue’ feels even more cerebral than her debut, more improvisational, and more rooted in landscape. But for all the meditativeness and all the improvisation, there is a single-minded artistry at work behind these pieces. 

Delivered with eloquence, fire and an impressive eye for poetic detail, Lonnie Holley’s ‘Tonky’ is a work of multitudes. It follows unlikely trails, expands on themes other artists would pass over, and invites a depth of thought and engagement rarely found in contemporary music.

With lightness and an ear for a concise and cutting phrase, Clara Mann alchemises her experience into a universal emotional reaction on ‘Rift’. In the space of a debut, she has gone from ‘one to watch’ to one of the best songwriters in the country.

On ‘Come Into the Garden’, Natalie Wildgoose conjures a strange world submerged in sweet, subtle sound and rich in the unlearnable language of dream and memory.

Gigspanner Big Band talk about their new album, Turnstone, revealing an insight into an album that exists in a tradition of sprawling and inclusive experimentalism and where variation and difference are celebrated and encouraged.

The songs on Alex Rex’s ‘The National Trust’ may revel in bitterness and humiliation, but they are real and unflinching and fearsomely clever and often beautiful. Neilson remains an absolute one-off.

It’s time Jeffrey Lewis was recognised as one of the best lyricists of his generation, The Even More Freewheelin’ should do more than cement that status. All things being fair, it should go down as one of the best albums of his career.

Oxfordshire and Derbyshire are the latest Ceremonial Counties to get the Folklore Tapes treatment, courtesy of nebulous experimental collective The Funz and audio archaeologist Mark Vernon. Both tracks are awash with unexpected and often eerie beauty.