Thomas Blake

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.

Glasgow-based singer Quinie’s ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ may have been several years in the making, and it may draw heavily on the songs of the past, but it feels like the perfect snapshot of a type of folk music that is unapologetically and gloriously present.

For their latest project, Remscéla, Milkweed engage in vibrant and vital ways with the Táin Bó Cúailnge, a foundational myth of Irish literary and historical tradition. They remain the most exciting band in folk music.

Iona Lane’s Swilkie is a masterful album full of heartfelt emotion and breathtaking songwriting, and the additional disc of live recordings casts the whole album as a journey from solo endeavour to collaboration, from the bud of an idea to a fully-realised work of art.

On Annie A’s ‘The Wind That Had Not Touched Land’, the boundaries between song, sound art and poetry disappear in a flicker or a haze, and the results are quietly mesmerising.

With Taba, Satomimagae has created a work of art full of wonder and mystery that builds upon itself in the most surprising ways. It speaks a different musical language, but learning that language is a joy and a reward in itself.

Following their 2012 debut, Màiri Morrison and Alasdair Roberts reunite on ‘Remembered in Exile: Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia’. It’s a beautiful and glimmering album on which they also demonstrate how to wring intense emotions from the most minimal of ingredients.