Bonny sings Susanna, to simply try and save the world. Sonata Dwarf Mix Cosmos is an old companion of his and with the Chijimi house band +1 they bring it all back home again, this time to the space in Bonny’s place.

“As other practitioners are leaving the room in favor of novel forms of recording and distro and consumption, we are left with a virtual PALACE, fantastical and real structures and practices. Like we are allowed into the museum at night. We can make a great essentially live record with great songs and great players because nobody else is? ‘Wolf Of The Cosmos’... is about, as much as anything, direct engagement with recorded music. So step right up to the replicant.” - Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy is joined by musicians Emmet Kelly (bass guitar, voice, acoustic guitar), Cheyenne Mize (violin, slide ukulele, voice), Chris Rodahaffer (banjo, voice, acoustic guitar) and Elsa Madeline Oldham (juice harp).

“‘Wolf Of The Cosmos’ is a wonderful obsessive trip into the mind of one of the most important living singers” - Country Music

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Beautifully emotive country-tinged plucks, BPB's unmistakable voice and softly pulled strings make for an enchanting an absorbing journey. Yet more evidence of the unwavering excellence of one of today's most successful singer-songwriters. Brilliantly fresh, but comfortable and familiar.

Anne Briggs has since been discovered by the present folk generation, male and female alike. Eliza Carthy, Kate Rusby, Alasdair Roberts and Riley Walker, are among many who recognise Anne Briggs as an extraordinary, inspirational voice.

Anne Briggs was born in Nottinghamshire in 1944 and began singing in local folk clubs in her teens. Her break came through the Centre 42 tour of 1962. This was a distinctly leftist group of artists, writers, actors and musicians whose lofty aim was to make arts and culture accessible to the masses. Local artists were invited to audition where Ewan MacColl first heard Briggs’ remarkable voice and persuaded her to join the tour. Briggs debut EP, The Hazards Of Love, was produced by Lloyd although Briggs never enjoyed recording and it was only though Lloyd’s coaxing that she contributed to his pioneering conceptual albums The Iron Muse and The Bird In The Bush. The first six, traditional, unaccompanied songs presented here are taken from these outstanding recordings made between 1963 and 1966 which display all the hallmarks of Anne Briggs artistry – pure, fluid and with flawless timing.

It wasn’t until 1971 that Briggs eventually recorded her debut album for Topic. Anne Briggs (Topic LP 12T207) was again produced by Lloyd. Briggs draws almost exclusively from the classic repertoire of British folk, her performances are both pure and unusual. Famously, Briggs taught Jansch ‘Blackwater Side’, which he then made his own on his classic 1965 debut album; the next year his pivotal traditional album Jack Orion largely comprised songs he learnt from Briggs who helped him understand the structure of folk song. Briggs and Jansch also wrote a handful of songs together. One of these, ‘Go Your Way (My Love)’, was eventually recorded for her Topic album, as was her definitive treatment of ‘Blackwater Side’.

timeless collection from the most famous and influential country singer of all time. Includes classic tracks “Folsom Prison Blues” and “I Walk the Line”, which became signature tunes that defined his long career. Includes free download card enabling you to download the full album as well as bonus Johnny Cash tracks.

Cash’s crossover appeal won him inductions into the Country music, Rock and Roll, and Gospel music Halls of Fame and he was one of the most influential popular musicians of the 20th century. Johnny Cash’s genre-spanning songs and sound embraced rock and roll, rockabilly, blues, folk, and gospel.

One of the biggest-selling music artists of all time, having sold more than 90 million records worldwide, these classic tracks recorded 60 years ago which still ring out potent and true. On Cash’s death in 2003, Bob Dylan called him “the greatest of the greats, then and now”.

Simone Felice, the singer-songwriter/record-producer from deep in the Catskills, has announced the release of his new album The Projector on April 13, 2018 via New York Pro.

Riding the train down from the Catskills to New York City’s slam-poetry scene in 1998, a callow “tone-deaf” kid with little musical skills but verse in his heart. Forming a band with his brothers in 2005 and travelling the world. Hitting Number One in the US and UK with one production collaborator (The Lumineers’ Cleopatra, 2016), scoring a Mercury Music Prize nomination (Bat For Lashes’ The Bride, 2016) with another, striding into another side of 2018 with yet another (Peace, the Midlands band whose Kindness Is The New Rock And Roll bursts forth this spring).

The first single to be taken released from the record is album opener and title track ‘The Projector’, premiering today on the Line of Best Fit. Spectral, almost skeletal at first, before the man’s resonant voice and spartan guitar are joined by shiversome choral vocals from Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan and haunted folktronica from Four Tet. Felice counts London’s genre-surfing experimentalist as both close friend and neighbour. The track is a hallucinatory walk through the backrooms and hallways of modern human paranoia and tech-induced loneliness, as the warped choir sings: ‘All the while you felt so alone/but all the while there were bugs in the phone and you were not alone.’

Up in the Catskill Mountains, Simone Felice was thinking. Considering the roads he’d taken, and also the roads that had taken him.

“I’ve been down the track,” says The Felice Brother turned solo artist, putting it mildly.

It was a lot to take in. And as he considered the prospect of a new album, it was a lot to get out, as well.

“So often artists are looking to what they’re doing next, or are stuck in where they are today,” Felice thinks. “Sometimes we forget to honour our history.”

“It speaks to my journey,” he begins. Back in the mid-Nineties, cresting out of his teens, he’d read at the Nuyorican Poets Café, a vital scene best exemplified by Saul Williams.

“I became a stand-up riddler, reciting my poems from napkins or from memory, it’s how I cut my teeth. For me this was the beginning of understating the diabolical alchemy of the English language, the rhymes, the pictures you can paint, both terrible and fair, or as Patti Smith calls it: “... a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés.”

Lights down, curtain up, flickering camera on: this is the world of The Projector. It’s a handcrafted album of lone guitars echoing in the twilight, nocturnal electronics and woodsy vocals in which you can hear and feel the grain. Of scenes and moods, shouts and cries and pleas, interweaving narratives lovingly birthed in Simone’s native woods, (with longtime recording collaborators David Baron, Pete Hanlon and James Felice) not far from the Kaaterskill Creek upon which he himself was born.

Our woodsy auteur will be coming down from the mountain this spring, travelling to the UK and Europe, one man and his guitar and his store of stories, for a series of evenings with Simone Felice. This Projector won’t be hitting any multiplexes, but it will be unspooling in a run of bespoke venues – special environments for very special songs where, if you listen carefully, you just might sense something so emotional and true it’s, well, cardiac.

“Since my surgery you can hear my heart ticking,” says Felice. He means it literally but, sure, we can take it figuratively, too. “If you’re in the room with me I’m the crocodile who swallowed the pocket watch. For a few years I’d try to dampen the sound when we made recording in the studio. But I’ve given up on that. If you listen closely you’ll hear it when things go quiet. You might mistake it for a metronome that’s off-time. But it’s not. It’s just my achy breaky heart.”

Lord Huron is an American indie folk band based in Los Angeles. The group's debut album, Lonesome Dreams, was released in 2012 on Iamsound in the US and Play It Again Sam in UK and Ireland in January 2013. The band released their second album, Strange Trails, in April 2015.

The band's name was inspired by Lake Huron, the lake which band founder Ben Schneider grew up. 'Lord Huron invites you to stare into the abyss this spring with the release of their third full-length album, Vide Noir. Written and recorded over the past two years at Lord Huron’s Los Angeles studio and informal clubhouse, Whispering Pines. The album was mixed by Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips/MGMT) and engineered by Sonny DiPerri (Portugal. The Man, Animal Collective).

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A brilliantly varied suite of thumping percussion, jagged guitar riffage, nuanced ambient interludes and neo-folk melodies, underpinned with a steadily growing melodic wash of ambience. Vide Noir is a brilliantly compiled journey from start to finish.

The latest LP from UK band Mudlow is a retrospective compilation of hand-picked songs from their previously-released studio albums and EP's. Some swamp punk whiskey-driven film-noir blues'. 

"Blues sung with a low rasp and roar, guitar as nasty and swampy as you want." Everett True - Plan B Magazine

"dirty guitars and sleazy howling vocals&the kind of music that makes you want to bark like a dog...” Erin Prior - BBC Southern

Note – the vinyl version of this is being released on RSD.

In life and music, Emma Tricca is an explorer. Just as ‪Davey Graham set sail for Morocco and ‪Vashti Bunyan for the Outer Hebrides in search of their elusive ‪muse, Rome-raised singer-songwriter Tricca has journeyed to London, New York, Texas and further afield to seek the heart of her own music. And like those renowned voyagers, she's returned with a set of songs that refresh the tired old folk form. Tricca's new album St Peter – created with a cast of supporting artists including global icon ‪Judy Collins, ‪Sonic Youth's ‪Steve Shelley and Dream Syndicate guitarist Jason Victor – takes a bracing plunge into the unknown, leaving the folksinger tag far behind with a rolling collection of reverie-inducing raw diamonds.

It was encouragement from ‪Pentangle legend ‪John Renbourn that started Tricca on her lifelong path. An aspiring young player, she met Renbourn after a solo gig in Rome and impressed him with her fresh-cut songs. A move to the UK was inevitable, gigging around folk clubs first in Oxford and later in London, honing her craft as a songwriter and a fingerstyle guitarist. Extended stays in New York and Texas followed, before Tricca returned to London to begin work on her first melancholic masterpiece, 2009's crystalline long-player Minor White.

The album was released on Bird Records, an offshoot of Finders Keepers run by husband and wife team ‪Jane Weaver and ‪Andy Votel, who'd been thrilled by Tricca's talent (and her Italian leather boots) at the Green Man Festival in 2006. They secured her a show at ‪Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown Festival in London, ensuring international exposure, a major European tour and a run of shows with her old friend Renbourn.

Five years later Tricca released Relic, an album even more poised and precise than its predecessor. Scoring rave reviews across the board – 4 stars in Record Collector and Mojo, 5 in Time Out – the album added gentle percussion and plaintive orchestration to the established pattern of hushed guitar and heartfelt vocals. A collaboration with longtime friend and guitar wizard Jason McNiff led to 2017's sparkling Southern Star EP, while a song on the soundtrack of Patrick Stewart-starring US indie film Match raised her profile. But encouraged by Weaver – who urged her to 'explore the weirdness' in her music – Emma Tricca was hungry for a new challenge.

The road to St Peter began with a chance meeting at South by Southwest between Tricca and producer and musician Jason Victor, and the formation of an instant friendship. During a Skype call one Christmas morning the pair decided to start work on a new project together, hauling in ‪Sonic Youth drummer ‪Steve Shelley and New York bass hero Pete Galub to help Tricca explore the rougher sound that was in her head. Recorded near-live at Echo Canyon West in Hoboken, the album draws on crunchy country rock, homespun psychedelia, Morricone soundtracks, New York underground grit and English folk grandeur to weave a wholly unique and surprising spell.

More musical guests soon joined the party – gruff songwriting hero ‪Howe Gelb put in a brief cameo, while Tricca was able to live out a childhood fantasy by inviting ‪Judy Collins to appear on the album's penultimate cut, Solomon Said. As a teenage folkie Tricca had recorded one of Collins's TV performances onto VHS, and worn the tape out trying to mimic her picking style. Now they were working together, on perhaps the album's most startling, transporting track.

The album is one so loaded with texture that is almost feels tangible, a rare record that feels precise and pristine in its executions but never sterile or lifeless. Electric guitars fizz away like a controlled electricity, Tricca’s guitar playing flows gracefully at the core with her vocals existing in the perfect state between slight rasp and caramel-smoothness. Shelley’s drumming and percussion gives a steady heartbeat to the record which is further brought to life by a variety of deft instrumentation, including piano, bass, cello, violin, glockenspiel and of course the variety of guest backing vocalists.

Whilst St Peter’s deep-seated roots can perhaps be traced to traditional folk music, its finished existence feels far from such a thing - its ever-flowing essence skipping through genres, tones, paces and rhythms with a gliding grace. Perhaps even a touch of the spirit of Hoboken’s own Yo La Tengo has seeped into the finish record in its quiet yet stirring beauty. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Moving from haunted demi-melodies and tenderly plucked guitar, imbued with tastefully echoing reverb and Tricca's delicate voice, influenced by decades of classic Americana and folk but sounding like none of the above. Brimming with emotion, and thoroughly enchanting. Superb.