Albums

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.

With ‘In The Dark We Grow’, Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage have delivered a brilliant and beguiling album; well-crafted and captivating, it’s one to treasure.

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.

J.R. Bohannon & Dave Shuford’s ‘Reclined in the Haze’ is a cracker, a daring set that manages to balance Eastern musical influences with country licks and experimental improvisation. I already love this and it’s one I’ll revisit for the foreseeable.

David Grubb finds musical challenges in unusual places, and on Circadia, he wordlessly depicts our dreamworlds, shining a light on a time when who we are and what we know mysteriously stirs the mind while the body rests.

John Spillane’s “Fíoruisce – The Legend of the Lough” is epic storytelling, requiring a scale of ambition that few would contemplate. It sits alongside such fine works as Peter Bellamy’s The Transports and Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown.

‘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.

The End Of The Rainbow is one of Sean Taylor’s most impassioned albums; for all the tribulations, he ultimately offers the hope and faith that “the world keeps turning by and by”.

With a voice that echoes the spirit of Neil Young and a profound connection to the desert southwest of New Mexico, AJ Woods brings a personal touch to his music with Hawk Is Listenin’, a diverse collection of soulful songs that reflect his deep understanding of the region.

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 it’s probably fair to say that Si Kahn’s name is not as popularly well-known as that of Seeger or Guthrie, as Labor Day – and the many albums before it – unequivocally demonstrates, he’s every inch their equal.