Feature Interview

We chat to Junior Brother, whose songs are known for veering between the intensely personal and the hotly political. On his third album, The End, the Dublin-based songwriter’s ragged and uncompromising delivery reaches new heights of unexpected beauty, strangeness and relevance. Throughout the interview, his answers to our questions were considered and wide-ranging.

“I feel like I’m looking a little bit more outward now,” confesses Brian Christinzio, aka BC Camplight. And with good reason. He talks to KLOF Mag about “A Sober Conversation”, his fifth album for Bella Union in a decade, his seventh overall, which has been universally acclaimed, praised not just for his songwriting chops and musicianship, but also its subject matter.

We chat to Ruth Clinton and Cormac MacDiarmada of Poor Creature about their debut album, All Smiles Tonight. A deep dive into its making, their influences (from the Cocteau Twins to Ellen Arkbro) and more. The album feels like a new high point in the constantly evolving experimental folk scene centred around Dublin and a thoroughly modern foray into ancient musical territory. But is it folk?

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.

Gigspanner Big Band talk about their new album, Turnstone, revealing an insight into an album that exists in a tradition of sprawling and inclusive experimentalism and where variation and difference are celebrated and encouraged.

We chat with 21st-century renaissance man Sam Amidon about his influences, his love of instrumental music, jazz and folk; and of course, the creation of his sublime new album ‘Salt River’.

We catch up with Senegalese kora master Seckou Keita to chat about his wonderful new Homeland (Chapter 1) album, a rich, beaming tapestry, and the various aspects of life that inspired it.

Gearing up to release Silver Horizon (out this Friday, 16th August), Sheffield-based singer-songwriter and guitarist Sam Carter talks to us about his distinctive new sound.

It’s unusual to encounter a debut full-length album with as much confidence and clarity as Malin Lewis’s Halocline, which is also a work of subtle, nuanced beauty. We met with the Scottish piper to learn more about it.

Martin Simpson is our latest ‘Off the Shelf’ guest, in which we ask artists to present objects from a shelf or shelves from their home and talk about them. Martin’s new album, Skydancers, is out now on Topic Records.

We met Jenny Sturgeon and Boo Hewerdine to talk about their new Outliers album, a beautiful celebration of spontaneity and space, blending strong songwriting with acoustic arrangements and subtle electronics.

We meet up with English folk masters Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden, our current Artists of the Month, to talk about their wonderful new album Glad Christmas Comes and rum topped diplomacy…