Albums

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.

Chasing Light, the new instrumental duo album from Henry Parker & David Ian Roberts is a rich, fulfilling work by two intuitive players operating at a very high level and seemingly enjoying every moment.

at Eulogy, the latest live album from the folk alternative experimental trio ‘Setting’ (ft. Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly & Joe Westerlund) is a hell of a journey…get lost in a strange, mesmerising and quite beautiful soundscape.

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.