Thomas Blake
Thomas Blake
Thomas Blake lives in the West Country with his wife and his son. He writes things down and looks things up for a living. He likes wine, cricket and modernism. And lots of black coffee.
For Old Time Fantasias, Joseph Allred enlisted the help of pianist Hans Chew. Before long, the project had burgeoned into what Allred calls ‘probably the most involved and densely orchestrated album I’ve made to date.’ Featuring banjo, strings, pump organ and trombones, Allred’s visionary music will carry you into an ever-changing world of dreamy American pastoralia.
David Ivar, aka Herman Dune, offers his fifteenth album, Odysseús, a testament to his open and humanistic musical philosophy. Born from a period of isolation during the pandemic, the songs blend classic Herman Dune with a profound sense of yearning. A consummate artist and a songwriter adept at hiding emotional depths in plain sight, Odysseús is another outstanding example of his work.
Ben LaMar Gay’s Yowzers is a soulful journey where tradition meets boundless creativity. Gay blends bluesy gospel, improvisational jazz, and cosmic folklore into something fresh and deeply moving. This eclectic and graceful album, built with immense detail and an even greater heart, unfolds like passing clouds, revealing new wonders with each listen.
Although the sound of Barcelona native Ferran Orriols may initially seem quite self-contained, in reality, he is well-versed in a wide variety of musical forms, and he mixes them with ease and lightness throughout Darrere els horts. Highlights include a Heron cover featuring Steve Jones and a jubilant closing title track that provides a joyous coda to one of the most unexpected triumphs of the year so far.
Erlend Apneseth has spoken of his wish ‘to compose more for musical personalities than for instruments’, and this absolutely shines through on Song over Støv, where every element exists as a unique voice, worthy of its own space but always serving the collaborative whole. It’s an album without a hint of excess, masterfully crafted and brilliantly performed.
For this month’s Ceremonial Counties offering from Folklore Tapes: Vol.XV Leicester/Northumberland, the first half features Experimental electronic musician Steve Watts and is dedicated to the legend of Black Annis. The second half, composed and performed by Grey Malkin, another British artist indebted to folk horror and hauntology, tells the story of the Duddo stone circle, an arrangement of five (formerly seven) sandstone megaliths in the shadow of the Cheviot Hills.
Like the tarot’s major arcana, The Rabbit, the latest album from Melissa Lingo, aka meka, can be experienced as a kind of tarot reading, a mystical, alluring set of pathways into the human mind, a comment on fate, a dream with a cast of obscure characters. It’s no great stretch to put meka right up there with her heroes in the pantheon of folk songwriters.
For his new album, Under a Familiar Sun, Sam Beste AKA The Vernon Spring further refines his unique sound…sitting somewhere between new age, neoclassical, jazz and a kind of pastoral electronica. It is the most immediately rewarding exercise in ambience you’re ever likely to hear, but it contains ideas and melodies, vague sensations and politically driven statements, that will stay with you long after the last notes fade away.
For their second album, The World That I Knew, Dublin-based duo Varo perform alongside a revolving cast of collaborators including members of Lankum, John Francis Flynn, Alannah Thornburg, Junior Brother, Lemoncello, Niamh Bury, Anna Mieke and more, picked judiciously from that fertile Dublin scene, and fostered by the sterling production of John ‘Spud’ Murphy. They track contemporary concerns through traditional song, and do so with beauty and fierce compassion.
While she grew up in Yorkshire, Iona Lane’s new album, Swilkie, is a love song to Scotland’s islands and the people who live there, and an impassioned plea for the conservation of wild spaces and communities on the margins. A relative newcomer to the region, she spoke to KLOF about how she came to know and love her adopted homeland, and how it came to inform her music.