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.
On Old Segotia, Seán Mac Erlaine and Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh engage in an intense musical conversation. Rather than compromising between folk and jazz, they create a new palette, crafting varied tracks that shift from smoky grooves to avant-garde improvisation. Augmenting traditional instruments with electronics and field recordings, the duo create a complex, surprising map of new musical terrain.
Emily A. Sprague’s “Cloud Time” is one of the most stunning ambient records in recent memory. Recorded live in Japan, it draws from the “naturalist” school of modular synthesis, engaging with the Japanese tradition of environmental music. Sprague whittled hours of recordings into a suite that is both deeply contemplative and refreshingly human, a “sonic wonderment” of texture and off-the-cuff creativity.
On Merlyn Driver’s debut album, “It Was Also Sometimes Daylight,” there is an ease to his singing and playing that belies the nuance and complexity of his songwriting, which at times approaches genuine poetry. He takes highly personal, confessional songwriting and elevates it with unconventional language. It’s also a timely reminder of the small amount of time and space we all take up on this world.
Greg Jamie is unashamedly preoccupied with the liminal. Across a Violet Pasture, tilts at the hard-to-hit zone between sleep and waking. This is Old Weird America with a nod to the stranger recesses of British hauntology. At times, the Townes Van Zandt comparisons also seem more apposite than ever, a reminder that, for all the uncanny, rootless strangeness of his music, the album is built on Jamie’s outstanding songwriting.
On The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s “Sasquatch Landslide”, there are instrumental wails and squalls, bits of melody careen into the middle distance, an electronic soup bubbles away, and a thick buzz underpins everything. While it sounds like it could be messy, it’s not; it’s more like the semi-organised bustle of a busy souk, with its tension between chaos and order, where every sound has its meaning and its place.
Michael Hurley’s final album, Broken Homes and Gardens, finds him in essential form: digressive, surreal, jokey, ultimately moving. A folk prankster with a poet’s soul. A fitting way to cap a thirty-odd album legacy that is as important as practically any songwriter you care to mention. He sounds like he had a whole lot more up his sleeve. He always did.
John Elliott of The Little Unsaid has a way of drawing listeners in with universal truths presented in the most personal – and often poetic – of ways. On Stay Fragile All Across This Cold Frontier, the album moves from intimate piano ballads to raw blues-rock and stately meditations, confirming The Little Unsaid as one of the best-kept secrets in contemporary music.
On ‘Forgetting Is Violent’, Patrick Shiroishi tackles racism at large, both in the past and from a contemporary standpoint. That his work carries such depth of meaning, even at its most minimal, is a testament to his skill as a composer and musician, but also listener and interpreter of stories. The album is a lightning rod for those stories, a vivid warning from history and a vibrant cri de coeur.
The key ingredient of “A Danger to Ourselves” is depth. It is an album of unfathomable musical depths, but perhaps more importantly, it is an album about depth of feeling, the abyss from which desire springs like a liquid flame. Lucrecia Dalt gives herself over completely to exploring this depth, and the singular work of art that emerges is as detailed and as unexpected as any treasure.
His ability to slip unseen from folky pastoralism to improvised experimentation puts Glenn Kimpton at the forefront of the current group of British acoustic guitarists taking their inspiration from foundational American exponents like Robbie Basho and John Fahey. He is in good company with those names, and he doesn’t seem out of place. Small Show is assured and highly rewarding.