Artist of the Month

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.

On Junior Brother’s third album, The End, Ronan Kealy displays real genius in the way he links ancient themes, such as the album’s underlying central motif of fairy forts, to our contemporary plight. “we can do nothing other than hang on his every word, words that slip from calm to fervid to agonised. It’s a journey we are willing to take again and again.”

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?

Tension, contrast and juxtaposition are words that inevitably come to mind at multiple points throughout All Smiles Tonight. Poor Creature are masters at harnessing that tension and creating soundworlds that are utterly compelling from start to finish. This is music that straddles darkness and light, and traverses the blasted terrain of loss in wholly unexpected ways, picking apart and reassembling the whole idea of folk music as it goes.

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.

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.

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.

Gigspanner Big Band’s ‘Turnstone’ is a great example of how traditional song can provide a template for exciting new musical discovery. It’s also a career-defining release from one of folk’s most powerfully creative groups.

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’.

Sam Amidon’s Salt River is an album whose full kaleidoscopic experience is revealed through repeated listens. Eclectic is an easily applied word, but here we have an artist releasing a groundbreaking, spirited and adventurous album that is genuinely worthy of the description.

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.

It’s clear from this first chapter of Homeland that Seckou Keita is here to take us on a musical journey; peppered with guest artists, the whole thing is a beautiful, buoyant celebration of life and place. Music this joyous and full of pathos is irresistible.