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For their sixth album, A Forest of Arms, the Great Lake Swimmers find their principal songwriter and lead voice, Tony Dekker, at his most potent. The album bristles with some of their strongest tunes and the most dynamic playing that the band have realised so far.

With a talent partly forged in Florida and fuelled by French cinema’s New Wave Robert Chaney’s Cracked Picture Frames marks the arrival of a notable new voice on the London music scene. The album is sharp, intelligent, thoughtful and moving, as Robert sings, “I got some simple words to say,” but he says them so well, you can’t fail to be mightily impressed.

We have a video teaser from Beyond The Marches / Dros y Ffin and an update from Elan Rhys about their performance at Hoddinott Hall in the Millennium Centre, Cardiff. Their final performance is this evening at Cecil Sharp House.

In her notes on the album, Thea writes that listening back to the old songs was like being haunted by the ghosts of her past. Rather than exorcise them, she’s given them new life while continuing to graffiti the wall of the music industry with music that matters, music with a heart and a mind rather than a corporate game plan. Long may she be “the girl that went and …

22 Strings finds Seckou Keita at the top of his game in a never less than compelling collection which draws together many threads: musings on identity, place, history, of music viewed through the lenses of past and present. An absorbing document of his inner search for answers to some of the essential questions of existence, filtered through his deep respect for tradition while facing the future with an irrepressible positivity.

Elan Rhys of Welsh band Plu updates us on Beyond The Marches / Dros y Ffin – Day Five. The live performances take place over this weekend and Monday. Try and see them if you can, they really do deserve the support for all the hard work they’ve put in.

David Gibb updates us on Day Four of Beyond The Marches / Dros y Ffin which starts off with the word ‘Rum’ and ends on ‘Rum’. Next thing you know they’ll be turning up for breakfast late in their pyjamas…Archie.

With a new line up including Dan Walsh, Paloma, Joe and Tom have pushed the UFQ to new heights and The Escape offers exactly that with myriad musical highlights and global grooves to get lost in for months. This is the band at their brilliant best so make sure you catch them live on their current tour.

The Spyglass & The Herringbone gathers up all of Jackie Oates promise to date, dusts it down and adds polish to present a sparkling jewel of a folk record. It’s a rare and most refined thing of gift of great beauty and as good a record as you could rightly hope for, that’s all yours for the small price of admission.

We continue our guest blog series Beyond The Marches / Dros y Ffin. Elan heads to the National Library of Wales, receives a talk from Welsh harpist Robin Huw Bowen including an insightful introduction to the triple harp before looking at some of the difficult to access archives. A perfect example of why a digital archive is needed.

As part of our ongoing coverage of Beyond The Marches / Dros y Ffin award winning song writer and story teller David Gibb shares his thoughts on Day Two. A visit to the Museum of Welsh Life in St Fagans, a lecture from Wales’ answer to Cecil Sharp, Roy Saer and you can watch them all performing Lord Randal.

As part of our ongoing coverage of Beyond The Marches / Dros y Ffin which is now underway, we have the first guest blog from Elan Rhys, the lead vocalist of folk group Plu. Day one included a performance on Radio 4’s Front Row programme and research at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at Cecil Sharp House.