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KLOF Mag’s Mixtapes and Shows page now features a persistent player — two new buttons, Play and Info, let you keep listening while browsing the archive, or swap between mixes freely. Older code going back to 2010 has also been updated. With over 450 mixes in the archive and new ones added weekly, it’s a good time to explore.
Helen Svoboda shares “Veins,” featuring Finnish vocalist Selma Savolainen, from her forthcoming album “Headwater” (out June 26th on Room40). The track draws Svoboda’s Finnish background into the vocal work, with Savolainen circling a single phrase about mother and daughter — “This short pondering is injected with raw emotion and melancholic beauty, as if she is bursting out of her younger self.”
Bring Your Own Hammer returns with two new singles, giving voice to figures the archive left in the margins. “The Cruel Father,” from Lavinia Blackwall and Neil Farrell with SJ McArdle, draws on an 1860s ballad about a father who abandoned his infant son. “The Girl from Spark’s Lake,” sung by Sophie Coyle, follows a runaway chasing bluebells.
Nora Stanley has spent years as a saxophonist and improviser on records by Cassandra Jenkins, The New Pornographers and Beth Orton. Now she steps out front. Her solo debut “Glass,” out July 31st via Worm Records and co-produced with Nate Mendelsohn, arrives with lead single “Noble Gas”, with Wendy Eisenberg calling her songs ‘subtly devastating.’
Memorial, the Brighton duo of Jack Watts and Oliver Spalding, share “Rest (& be thankful)”, their second release for Ólafur Arnalds’ OPIA Community, featuring Irish singer-songwriter Niamh Regan. Named after a Scottish valley and written in half an hour, it holds a steady, driving rhythm while layered harmonies build toward a release carried by Ben Bishop’s guitar and lifted by Regan’s voice.
Darren Hayman reissues “The Violence,” the double album he calls the most ambitious work of his thirty-year career. First released in 2012 and recorded with his sixteen-piece ensemble The Long Parliament, it closes his Essex Trilogy with songs about the 17th-century East Anglian witch trials and the English Civil Wars, now expanded with previously unreleased tracks and demos.
Horse Feathers reissue their long out-of-print debut, “Words Are Dead”, on August 28th via Kill Rock Stars. Recorded in Portland in 2006 by the duo of Justin Ringle and Peter Broderick, the album returns fully remastered, on exclusive vinyl, with a replica of the original six-song demo CD. Hear “Finch on Saturday”, the first thing the band ever committed to tape.
Prison pull up with their third album, “Big Rigs on the BQE”, out July 31st, a long way from last year’s “Downstate”. They’ve shared lead cut “Sunrise Highway” with a scorching single edit video from Johnny Celentano and Cliff Elor — a fast, garage-bred psych charge built live from guitars, bass, drums, fuzz organ and vocals. Two side-long trips, tracked overlooking the highway.
A major archival release celebrates Martin Carthy MBE. “Along The Road Forever: Live At The BBC (1965-2022)” collects 328 recordings — 22½ hours across 20 CDs, spanning his solo work, his duo with Dave Swarbrick, with his daughter, Eliza Carthy, as well as Steeleye Span, Brass Monkey, The Watersons and Waterson:Carthy. It includes an 80-page book with a new Clinton Heylin essay.