Thomas Blake

It feels as if the songs on Constant Follower’s ‘The Smile You Send Out Returns To You’ have been nurtured, perhaps subconsciously, over the two decades it took to realise his musical ambitions, resulting in an incredibly moving and distinctive album.

Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings’ Parlour Ballads shines a light on an unfairly neglected part of musical history–a collection of beautifully performed, sad and compassionate songs brought to life by one of folk music’s premier performers.

Through OPHELIA, Angeline Morrison conjures a perfect, otherworldly landscape of hauntological folk music…imagine if Broadcast’s Trish Keenan had been kidnapped at birth by the Copper family and raised on a diet of Angela Carter’s fairy tales…

Scottish singer Kate Young’s solo debut Umbelliferæ is an album full of ambition, but Young never lets that ambition blind her to the importance of her message or the sheer delight of her songcraft. Umbelliferæ is the work of years: a wise, joyous epic.

John Patrick Elliott is an expert when it comes to making seemingly disharmonious concepts and radically disparate musical ideas work together, and My Role in the Show is the most perfectly realised example of that talent in his distinguished career.

The latest Betwixt and Between offering features London-based singing duo Bridget & Kitty and Sheffield free-folk improvisers Resonant Bodies. The cassette series is quickly becoming a valuable document of the outer reaches of British experimental folk music.

Today sees the release of Junior Brother’s new single, ‘Take Guilt’, accompanied by a Lyric Video by Dylan Gomery. With a UK tour in October, he is currently working on album number three, with famed producer John “Spud” Murphy (black midi, Lankum) at the helm.

Displaying a real willingness to push boundaries, The Rheingans Sisters’ ‘Start Close In’ is an endlessly fascinating, multi-faceted album steeped in the traditions of European folk dance but equally inspired by the avant-garde leanings of John Cale and twentieth-century minimalism.

For all its calming qualities, ambient music can also capture strange and uncanny life forces. Myles O’Reilly seems to understand this innately, and he puts it to mesmerising use on Music From the Threshold, an album suffused with grace and dignity, strangeness and quiet passion.

‘Moon in Gemini’ is one of those albums that wears its apparent simplicity as a cloak, disguising a host of concepts, implications, and influences. Isik Kural has quietly, and with a distinct emphasis on care, made one of the year’s most varied and rewarding albums.

While Ash Grey and the Gull Glides On may appear as a head-on collision between Andrew Wasylyk’s downbeat neoclassical folktronica and Tommy Perman’s post-club, percussion-heavy ambient constructions, under the surface, there is the faint but delicious hint of the golden age of avant-garde music.

While Dorothy Carter missed out on experiencing the sudden mad rush of creativity that her music helped to inspire, the reissue of Troubadour, with its singular, strange and beautiful tunes, is a good sign that her star is once again in the ascendency.