Albums

“Keep Me On Your Mind/See You Free” eclipses the already high standard of their previous two albums and demonstrates the value of genuine improvisation in popular music and the unique natural chemistry at the heart of Bonny Light Horseman.

With ‘The Wind’, Ann Annie explores the notions of what ambient music can portray, creating wafts of colour that tug and occasionally tear at the fabric of life…finding ways to take you places you might never have found otherwise.

L’Etrangleuse’s Ambiance Argile is a richly hypnotic album filled with raw energy. It touches on folk, DIY punk, postpunk, krautrock, and electric desert blues, and the rapport and connection between musicians belie their relatively short existence as a quartet.

Buck Curran’s ‘One Evening and Other Folk Songs’ is an album of hidden depths. His talent is an alchemical one: seemingly quotidian musical ingredients are turned into rare metals in his hands, and with this eclectic but hugely talented band, the results are doubly impressive.

Jason McNiff has always written music on his terms; this is especially evident on Everything’s A Song. He has once again delivered an album of the finest contemporary roots music; it’s another absolute gem.

Eric Chenaux’s recent solo offerings offered a strange and beautiful alchemy quite unlike anything else in popular music. Delights of My Life is a continuation of that magic formula but with a more collaborative focus. Chenaux’s spellbinding run of form shows no signs of stopping.

Joshua Massad & Dylan Aycock’s Two Improvisations is absolutely fascinating music that is as mercurial as it is rhythmic and steady. Imagine Ry Cooder and Vishwa Mohan Bhatt’s A Meeting by the River with the experimental knob turned right up and you’ll get close. Spellbinding.

Like the album’s title, Ora Cogan’s gift is her formlessness: her absolute refusal to bow to convention, as she tirelessly shifts and strives for something bigger – something we never expected.

There is an intimacy to the music of Samana that one rarely hears today and on their self-titled LP the music haunts your inner reaches, overflowing with ideas and alchemy.

Paul Armfield’s Trees is an arboreal delight, commissioned by Gift To Nature, the songs give a unique voice to the different trees that grow on Sibden Hill in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight.

Sealladh highlights Rachel Newton’s gift for subsuming visual reference points within a musical purview, coming up with melodies that are disarming, deceptively simple and utterly beautiful.

Live in Kyoto captures the energy and inspired playing that typically infuses a Lúnasa gig, with the sparkling sound of their unique combination of instruments, and the added freshness of great tunes that are not so familiar.