Featured

Gareth Bonello, aka The Gentle Good, has written an in-depth guide to his new album ‘Elan’ (also featuring audio and video). The album is a psychedelic portrait of Cwm Elan, the Elan Valley in Powys, Wales. It explores the landscape, history, and politics of the area that was flooded at the end of the Victorian era to create a series of reservoirs for drinking water. Out now on Bubblewrap Collective.

The Gentle Good’s latest album, Elan, is a concept album of sorts, a study of the Elan Valley in Powys through music, recorded off-grid in the Cambrian mountains. An admirable creation, it’s a broad and generous soundscape for a beloved area of Wales, containing both music and singing that is diverse, adventurous and rich in character. Gareth Bonello’s most ambitious album so far, this bumper collection is a triumph.

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.

Glasgow-based singer Quinie’s ‘Forefowk, Mind Me’ may have been several years in the making, and it may draw heavily on the songs of the past, but it feels like the perfect snapshot of a type of folk music that is unapologetically and gloriously present.

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.

Throughout ‘Uncharted’, the new album from Rachael McShane & The Cartographers, the music sounds fresh and vibrant alongside Rachael’s bright vocals. It’s perfect for spring and hugely enjoyable to listen to. And for that, we can be grateful.

A special Artists on Artist interview between multi-instrumentalist experimental alt-pop artists Shugo Tokumaru (Japan) and Matt Hsu’s Obscure Orchestra (Australia/Taiwan) covering influences, childhood, creativity and more.

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.

With Hinterland, Gerry Diver and Lisa Knapp wanted to create something ‘raw and real and unrestrained,’ something that flies in the face of the notion that folk music is a static form…this gloriously free-spirited album is the perfect example of folk’s potential for reinvention. 

Jim Ghedi’s ‘Wasteland’, for all its anger and anguish, provides us with many moments of beauty. It is a timely reminder of the potency of art in a world that seems to be turning uglier by the day, and it might just be Ghedi’s masterpiece.

For Matt Hsu, multi-arts all percolate in the making of music, so for the joint release of Noodle and Forest Party, Matt called on comic illustrator Madi Marston to make a comic about Obscure Orchestra. Read it here.