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With this year’s Supersonic Sunday-lineup featuring some of KLOF’s favourites, we went along for the ride. Bridget Hayden, Jackie-O Motherf-cker, Hedgling, Six Organs of Admittance, Cinder Well, Jennifer Reid, Poor Creature, Richard Dawson, Funeral Folk and The Bug & Warrior Queen were outstanding. On the strength of these performances, Supersonic can claim to be not just the best small festival in the country, but the best of any size.
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.”
“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?
The Archivists (2020) is a Canadian short film directed by Igor Drljaca that explores how artistic creation is the ultimate expression of our interconnectedness. Set in a dystopian future where past art is forbidden, the film follows three musicians who discover a secret room in an abandoned home containing vinyl records and a gramophone. Selecting one of the albums to play, they are inspired to perform one of the songs.
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.
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.