Equal parts soft and sorrowful, Myriam Gendron’s stunning Not So Deep As A Well LP became something of a sleeper hit upon its initial release back in 2014. Her debut album shone a warm lamp-light glow upon a curious and captivating new voice in the Quebecois folk world.

Nearly ten years on from its release in her native Canada and America, Not So Deep As A Well gets a European release for the first time this autumn, with a new pressing on the Basin Rock label (Julie Byrne, Aoife Nessa Frances, Trevor Beales, Juni Habel) which features two tracks not included on the original release - ‘Bric-à-brac’ and ‘The Small Hours’ - both written and recorded in the early days of 2014.

Recorded alone in her apartment, with no knowledge of sound engineering, it could almost be a lost artefact, a dust-lined document of a forgotten time and place. Taking the poems of Dorothy Parker, whose work Gendron stumbled upon by chance in a Montreal bookstore, she imbues the words with a graceful, gentle expression, a lingering sense of sorrow always present.

A stark, spellbinding collection, Not So Deep As A Well is raw and unyielding in so many ways we no longer expect to hear. As if sitting in the room with her, Gendron’s voice is cracked and unadorned, quietly forced into a push and pull between the quietude of the songs and the noisy world outside.

TRACK LISTING

1.Threnody
2. Solace
3.The False Friends
4. Ballade Of A Great Weariness
5.Bric-á-brac
6. Recurrence
7. The Red Dress
8. The Last Question
9. Not So Deep As A Well
10.Song Of Perfect Propriety
11. The Small Hours

"Meet Norway's new pastoral folk voice - guitar lines ripple like Nick Drake strumming for Karen Dalton - think Sibylle Baier or Julie Byrne" Uncut.

Crackled radio-like transmissions from Norway's rural hinterland. Juni Habel's fragile finger-picked lullabies warm themselves by the open fire with her rich intimate voice atop twinkling arrangements and strange percussive instrumentation. Like glowing embers in the dark, these songs are odes to life and death, the beauty of belonging and human kinship with nature.

Push open the door of the old school house in the remote flatlands of Southern Norway that Juni Habel shares with her close-knit family and climb the stairs; you’ll find yourself in a former classroom – the home of her new album Carvings. A songbook of life’s lessons offering an expansive perspective as it navigates personal shadows between darkness and light.

“I knew I wanted to write from a larger perspective. I wanted to write about the course of nature, and the people in it - life and death, beauty and tragedy.” Juni says, “loss - the search for the dead - grasping to find the words, and liberation of giving that up. I also wanted to explore my own kinship with nature - a sense of belonging, and notice what is around with gratitude and zest for life.”

This unyielding spirit of family and nature is etched into Carvings’ unschooled approach. With beauty in mock-simplicity and radiating humanity like the music of Tia Blake, Julie Byrne or Myriam Gendron, Juni’s songwriting unfolds on her own terms, and is the sound of facing whatever mother nature decides will find its way to the top of the list.

Recorded between the classroom (‘big hall’), the hallway on the 2nd floor, and her bedroom with simple gear and vocals laid down in a single take. Co-producer, musician and singer Stian Skaaden, became her melodic confidant and experimental co-conspirator halving the burden by building the album’s layers through blowing a pipe, playing bow on the banjo, bottles or glockenspiel. “With this album I wanted to lean deeper into the process. The title Carvings illustrates thoroughness. It was a vulnerable project, to strive for creating something truly beautiful, to pour my soul into it,” she says.

Uninhibited by the possibility of ‘mistakes’ and jamming until she struck gold, Juni confidently discovered the truest expression of herself. “It takes courage to do things ‘wrong’ with uncertainty, record lyrics which are strange but feel right, on crappy mics, it can be good to fumble a bit,” Juni says before tellingly, “the joy of playing is quite fragile. I have to protect it. You can't use your head, you have to be inside the song.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Yet another killer release from Basin Rock, with Juni Habel's 'Carvings' providing the perfect fireside listening. Brittle folk guitars crescendo with Habel's echoing vocals hovering over the top. Organically growing melodies come out of the smallest seed and bloom into heady orchestrated bliss.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Rhythm Of The Tides
2. I Went Out And Sought For Your Name
3. Little Twirl
4. Valiant
Side B
5. When We Awake
6. Chicory
7. Drifting Pounds Of The Train
8. I Carry You, My Love

Anti-counter culture loner folk from a teenage attic in the heart of rural Northern hippiedom.

Today the valley town of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire is world-renowned as something of a bohemian backwater. It wasn’t like this back in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when a disparate selection of radicals, drop-outs, heads, musicians, artists and writers started to be attracted to the Calder Valley. Local lad and future poet laureate Ted Hughes called the area “the fouled nest of industrialisation”.

Over time, those seeds of radicalism and collectivism ensured Hebden Bridge evolved into a place where people could be themselves and all shades of individual oddness not only tolerated but actively encouraged. But back at the turn of the dreary 1970s it remained a monochrome world defined by its unforgiving surrounding landscapes, where the old gritstone over-dwellings were stained with soot and rain lashed down for weeks.

It was here that Trevor Beales, who was born in 1953, grew up, and from where he drew musical and lyrical inspiration.

Perhaps it was this dual nationality heritage, unusual in the valley’s largely white working class population at the time, that gave the teenager Trevor Beale’s music an outsider’s perspective. The discovery of Bob Dylan, Django Reinhardt, The Byrds and James Taylor at a young age, lead to him picking up a guitar at the age of ten, and he was soon writing his own originals and performing them at local (though often remote) folk clubs and pubs.

Recorded in the attic of the family home at Ivy Bank in Charlestown on the verdant wooded slopes at the edge of Hebden Bridge between 1971 and 1974, these early recordings are collected here for the first time and mark Trevor Beales long-overdue solo debut.

In these songs is a suffer-no-fools sense of realism that is defiantly Northern, yet also expresses a worldliness that belies Beales’ young years, whilst also showcasing an inherent storyteller’s ear for narrative. Here is a postcard from the past at that crucial musical period of transition, when the idealistic exponents of the 1960s emerged into an austere new decade that was to be shaped by strikes, rising unemployment and economic upheaval.

Two aspects of this music make it remarkable: Beales’ natural ability showcases a sophisticated guitar-picking style that was leagues ahead of many of his (older, more recognised) contemporaries. This is music that can confidently hold its own with pioneers such as Davey Graham, Michael Chapman, Dave Evans, Bert Jansch and Jackson C Frank, as influenced by jazz, blues and steel guitar as any of the old songbook classics from ancient Albion.

Secondly, his lyrics are a far cry from either the naïve bedroom scribblings of a teenager who has barely left his upland home, nor do they fall foul of the type of lazy cliches and sub-Tolkien imagery that was still in abundance in the early 1970s. Most remarkably the earliest songs here were laid down less than a year after he left school (an unearthed report written by his headteacher on July 3rd 1970 noted he had “a considerable ability and interest in music”, though his education ended abruptly when he simply walked out of a science lesson one sunny day while at sixth form, never to return).

Trevor’s music is grounded in reality – his reality. ‘Then I’ll Take You Home’, for example, considers the Guru Marajai, who encouraged his acolytes to give over their worldly possessions, yet who drove a Rolls Royce and lived like a playboy. Unsurprisingly, this latest in a long line of spiritual charlatans found several followers in Hebden Bridge, and Beales casts a disdainful eye over the growing popularity for such false prophets.

With its ancient narratives and propensity for myth-making, folk has certainly produced it’s fair share of cult figures who have enjoyed rediscovery or career resurgence and with this debut compilation of home recordings, rescued from cassette tapes, Trevor Beales might just be the latest addition. Certainly he was the real deal.

Crucially, Beales' music is never jaded or cynical, but instead possesses a poet’s ear, a strong sense of self and some sound critical faculties. And much of it recorded at an age when he could neither vote nor order a pint of heavy.
Trevor Beales died suddenly and unexpectedly on March 29th 1987, aged 33. He left behind Christine and their young child Lydia. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another wonderful collection of folk from the ever-brilliant Basin Rock here. One of my favourite LP's from earlier this year was the stunning Andrew Tuttle LP, and though this shares similar instrumental leanings, it's from significantly closer to home, focusing on the early 70's in the Calder Valley.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Marion Belle
2. Tell Me Now
3. Dance Of The Mermaids
4. City Lights
5. The Old Soldier
6. Sunlight On The Table
Side B
7. Metropolis
8. The Prisoner
9. Braziliana
10. Then I'll Take You Home
11. Ocean Of Tears
12. Fireside Story 

Andrew Tuttle's Fleeting Adventure is a musical adventure through a reimagined journey from the Australian ambient producer and banjo player. A crew of fellow travellers - including Steve Gunn, Chuck Johnson, Luke Schneider and Balmorhea - help navigate a cosmic trip into subtropical landscapes. Golden plucks of banjo, gauzy electronics and cosmic guitar shimmer into gloriously expansive melodies that conjure peace and space, comfort and wonder.

A deepening sense of life, love, health, loss, and luck shaped the outlines of Tuttle’s fifth, and most collaborative album to date. Following a surprising exhilaration and exhaustion from the hitherto most innocuous of moments in mid-2020 - a half-hour drive to collect an online order, the furthest distance he’d traveled in months; Tuttle commenced working on new musical ideas loosely based around navigating the aftermaths and interregnums of a restless era. “I was thinking about what’s going on in the world and how localised it has become for so many of my friends in different places,” Tuttle explains. “Not in a negative way but more so focusing on how lovely it is when things are good.”

Thinking of musician friends and peers around the world – each confined to their own immediate surroundings – Tuttle’s generative and collaborative musical practice became a silvery through-line, connecting American innovators Steve Gunn, Chuck Johnson, Luke Schneider and Michael A. Muller (Balmorhea), to French/Swedish violinist Aurelie Ferriere and Spanish guitarist Conrado Isasa, back to Australian friends such as Voltfruit (aka Flora Wong and Luke Cuerel) and Darren Cross (Gerling) – among many others – each fitting seamlessly into Tuttle’s vibrant musical world.

Whilst previously a feature of Tuttle’s music, the exploration of space and texture found within Fleeting Adventure feels particularly vast and generous. The involvement of Chuck Johnson and Lawrence English mixing and mastering the album respectively, as with their work on Tuttle’s previous and breakthrough album Alexandra (Room40, 2020), inspired Andrew to develop songs that are as serene and patient as he’s ever sounded. Stripping elements back, the idea of pulling the songs apart somewhat, was just as important as adding the work of Andrew’s collaborators. “It is spacious through intent, process and assistance,” he confirms. "I thought carefully about what instruments - both what I played and what I asked others to provide based on my unadorned banjo track - would best work with what I was wanting to create.”

The road to Fleeting Adventure has been both long and short, but it sits as a tender and perhaps even vital reflection of an era in progress, in retrospect and in anticipation. A poignant contemplation on the many bonds that make up our lives from friends and family to the myriad places we inhabit and pass through along the way. The idea that an adventure doesn’t necessarily have to be a grand statement Andrew Tuttle has gathered up a number of his contemporaries and crafted something quietly spectacular, a new beginning to familiar habits. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Beautiful flickering banjo melodies and hazy instrumental Americana. Reminiscent of Balmorhea or Alexander Tucker, and resulting in a wonderfully immersive and balmy sound bath. Thoroughly stunning.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Overnight's A Weekend
2. Next Week, Pending
3. Correlation
4. Freeway Fle
Side B
5. New Breakfast Habit
6. Filtering
7. There's Always A Crow 

The Phantom Band guitarist, Duncan Marquiss's instrumental solo (ad)venture finds electronic guitar manipulations intertwine with wandering acoustic ambience. With one foot in 1970s Germany and the other in the woods, rivers and mountains of northeast Scotland.

“I like it when music builds itself up in an organic fashion,” says Duncan Marquiss. “When it just seems to emerge and almost writes itself.”
This natural, intuitive and free flowing approach is evident all across the debut solo album from the multi-disciplinary artist. From tender yet sweeping acoustic moments to experimental electronic guitar manipulations, the album feels like a ceaselessly sprawling exploration of texture and tone. Despite veering into what sounds like electronic ambient soundscapes, the entire album is rooted in the guitars. “I enjoy trying to stretch the guitar as an instrument,” says Marquiss. “That reflects my playing style, always trying to make the guitar sound different, or create non-guitar like sounds.”

Marrying earthy, textural acoustic instrumentals that feel rooted in open landscapes, with those that capture the pulse and hum of a populated metropolis (Marquiss resides in Glasgow). The album was recorded in Aberdeenshire in Marquiss’ parents' garage. “Apart from the wind and the swallows nesting in the eaves there’s not many distractions around,” he says. This is a solo record that goes right to the very essence of Marquiss as an artist. The expansive yet intimate sounds he’s created here stem from the same peaceful isolation of where it all began.

There’s a cosmic touch tracing back to 1970s Germany (Michael Rother solo, Cluster, Harmonia, Popul Vuh soundtracks) that infiltrates much of the album, alongside some of its more pastoral textures, with Marquiss citing a wide range of listening habits. These include Bruce Langhorne's The Hired Hand, Jim O Rouke's Bad Timing, Arthur Russell and Laurie Spiegel.

Despite containing no lyrics, the album feels rooted in narrative and development. As the album unfolds the acoustic guitar becomes more prominent over the electric, almost as if nature is slowly taking back and growing over abandoned human-made structures. A record that, despite being experimental in tone and essence, retains a very human and natural touch throughout. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Marquiss' solo record sees the Phantom Band guitarist pulling out a soaring selection of expansive ambient melodies skilfully wrought out of the guitar, resulting in an evocative and hypnotic selection of 70's synth influenced neo-folk gems.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Drivenhalle
2. C Sweeps
3. Fixed Action Patterns
SIDE B
4. Tracks
5. Murmer Double
6. Wires Turned Sideways In Time
7. Minor History

Eve Adams offers solace within life's shadows. Un-numbing senses with anthems of surrender and tender-hearted tales that tingle with Californian folk-noir, her album Metal Bird takes flight with the turbulence and romance of Hollywood’s golden age, and meditates on the mysteries of love, death, insecurity and loneliness.

Like a match struck in a cobwebbed attic, Adams voice is a fiery detective, unafraid to explore the unseen; the liminal spaces between mourning and rapture, between the coldness of a corpse and the heat of cremation. Imagery of flight and the denial of gravity floats slyly through the ten songs on Metal Bird by the California-born musician and hints at the experience of being caught in purgatory, like a passenger on a plane ride from Hell to Heaven.

Combining airy folk with haunting soundscapes the album takes listeners on an auditory voyage from sonorous lullabies, to dreamy ambience, skeletal jazz, 1930s torch songs and 1940s film noir. Metal Bird has a distinct, genuine tone, with orchestral arrangements, ambient hallucinations and high fidelity vocals that are unafraid to be heard loud and clear.

For those who are hopelessly enamoured with a by-gone time, there is solace in these songs and sounds. Flickering back and forth between dread and hope, the unrelenting march towards a spiritual transformation and the realization that each of us are driven by our own dreams and as much as we want to hold it in our hands, often it is intangible. The sublime remains elusive, existing somewhere in the heart, and it sounds like Eve Adams knows this best.

Metal Bird gets a release on Basin Rock, the Todmorden based record label who gave lift off to Julie Byrne, Aoife Nessa Frances, Nadia Reid and Johanna Samuels. 

"Metal Bird feels blissfully unmoored from any sense of time and space, its astral Americana hymns hovering somewhere between the dirt and the stars, between a bygone golden age and our tense present, between raw intimacy and dreamlike splendour." Pitchfork.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: What an absolutely enthralling selection this is, landing somewhere between gothic country music, 40's lounge and wistful folk, deftly flowing between influences without batting an eyelid. Wonderfully written, mournful pop songs that defy all expectation.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Blues Look The Same
2. You're Not Wrong
3. Butterflies
4. A Walk In The Park
5. Metal Bird
Side B
6. The Dying Light
7. Woman On Your Mind
8. La Ronde
9. Prisoner
10. My Only Dream

With a special knack for balancing bright pop melodies with a drifting sense of melancholy, LA based Johanna Samuels new album Excelsior! is a tender, honest document of the importance of companionship above all else. Named after Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna”, Samuels grew up on the classic songwriters of yesteryear (George Harrison, Tom Petty, Neil Young) and after a healthy dose of Elliott Smith and Jon Brion, has spent the best part of the last decade honing her craft.

'Excelsior! was recorded in a small cabin in West Shokan in NY State, in the middle of the winter with her band and producer Sam Evian but it's songs are full of West Coast sunshine. It's Evian's first full album production at his own Flying Cloud Studios. Recorded mostly to tape, the album is as a gorgeous combination of vintage instrumentation, strong melodic hooks, killer harmonies and Samuels’ elegant voice.

Samuels seeks those answers through companionship, exploring the depths of her relationships and then calling upon a handful of womxn to provide the album’s backing vocals - a task she’d always performed herself until now. As such, Excelsior! makes a space for the voices of Courtney Marie Andrews, Hannah Cohen, Lomelda’s Hannah Read, A.O. Gerber, Louise Florence and Olivia Kaplan.

The album takes its name from the signature that Samuels’ grandpa would use before he sadly passed away last December. “He was a very important person to me and he helped raise me,” Johanna explains. “He signed all of his letters and emails ‘Excelsior!’, including the exclamation point. It means ‘ever upward’ and that’s what I wish for everyone: to grow from listening with more empathy and from hearing each other out. I hope this record makes people want to be gentler with each other and themselves.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Sonny
2. Nature’s Way
3. High Tide For One
4. All Is Fine
5. The Middle
6. Close To The Vest
7. Song For Sid
8. Julie
9. Less Of You
10. Cathy

The music of Alex Maas has always mesmerised. Now, on his soul-baring solo debut Luca, the Texan and Black Angel's singer journey is taking an equally hypnotic detour along the wild trails of his indigenous homestead. Driven by the force of nature, each phase of life is celebrated through songs of love, hope, human connection whilst navigating perils of modern society and tentatively facing the darkness. 

TRACK LISTING

1 Slip Into
2 The Light That Will End Us
3 Special
4 Been Struggling
5 500 Dreams
6 What Would I Tell Your Mother
7 All Day
8 Shines Like The Sun (Madeline's Melody)
9 American Conquest
10 The City

On the eponymously titled final song of her debut album Land of No Junction, Irish songwriter Aoife Nessa Frances (pronounced Ee-fa) sings “Take me to the land of no junction/Before it fades away/Where the roads can never cross/But go their own way.” It is this search that lies at the heart of the album, recalling journeys towards an ever shifting centre - a centre that cannot hold - where maps are constantly being rewritten.

The evocative phrase is the result of a fortuitous misunderstanding. Reminiscing about childhood visits to Wales, Aoife’s musical collaborator and co-producer Cian Nugent, mentioned a train station called Llandudno Junction, which she misheard. “Land of No Junction later became a place in itself. A liminal space - a dark vast landscape to visit in dreams… A place of waiting where I could sit with uncertainty and accept it. Rejecting the distinct and welcoming the uncertain and the unknown.” Reveals Frances.

The songs traverse and inhabit this indeterminate landscape: the beginnings of love, moments of loss, discovery, fragility and strength, all intermingle and interact. Land of No Junction is shot through with a sense of mystery - an ambiguity and disorientation that illuminates with smokey luminescence. Yet, through the haze, everything comes down to what, where and who you are. Frances has built a universe full of intimacy and depth, with lyrics written through a process of free thought writing. It lends the record fluidity, each song in dialogue with the next not only through language, but the way each musical choice complements or threads into another.

Navigated by the richness of Aoife’s voice, along with the layers gently built through her collaborators’ instruments (strings, drums, guitars, keys, percussion), gives a feeling of filling up space into every corner and crack. A remarkable coherent sonic world: buoyant and aqueous, with dark undercurrents. The crossroads as a place where someone can be stuck, static in the face of the future, becomes instead an amorphous realm, where the remnants of the past and what is unknown meld together and come to an understanding. Where nostalgia and newness ebb and flow in equal measure.

TRACK LISTING

1. Geranium
2. Blow Up
3. Here In The Dark
4. A Long Dress
5. Less Is More
6. Libra
7. In The End
8. Heartbreak Junction
9. Land Of No Junction 

Fourth release on new independent label Basin Rock following highly acclaimed albums by Julie Byrne and Nadia Reid.

Born in Sheffield before moving around various parts of Derbyshire, Shropshire and Scotland and then settling in Moss Valley - an abandoned and forgotten area on the edgelands of South Yorkshire and North East Derbyshire - it makes perfect sense that 26 year old Jim Ghedi’s music feels both fluidly transient yet also deeply rooted to a sense of place.

In 2015 he released his debut album, Home Is Where I Exist, Now To Live and Die (Cambrian Records), which was an extension of the folk-tinged six and twelve-string acoustic guitar instrumentals he had been forging for some time around Sheffield's pubs and then whilst traveling across Europe. On his second album, A Hymn For Ancient Land, his elemental style of playing has expanded into a fuller band set-up, complete with glorious orchestration and dazzling composition that makes it a truly innovative contemporary record whilst still being rooted in great tradition.

Through the inclusion of double bass, violin, cello, harp, trumpet, piano, accordion and numerous other instruments, Ghedi has elevated his unique blend of folk music to a level far beyond that of that of his earlier work. Perhaps most remarkable still is how seamless their inclusions feel, rather than wrestling for space, the wealth of instruments float in and out of one another, interlocking absorbing guitars, gently whirring strings and drums that beat like the faint sounds of thunder on the horizon.

On top of the community of Moss Valley, a driving force behind much of the creations on this record come from Ghedi’s travels, playing shows in numerous rural towns and villages across the British Isles. This traversing through remote parts of the UK, Wales, Scotland and Ireland soon brought a desire to capture the full breadth, scale and beauty of the landscapes he was witnessing. “I wanted to bring in wider instrumentation to somehow resemble the landscapes which musically I could hear in my head, It was at this point I became fixated on connecting the two worlds of classical and contemporary folk” Ghedi says of the album’s birthing period.

All songs on the album are named after places from said travels - ‘Home for Moss Valley’, ‘Bramley Moor’, ‘Cwm Elan’ etc - and Ghedi’s natural ear and eye for capturing the spaces he inhabits creates an immersive environment, in which the guitar lines seem to mirror rolling hills, the rich hum of the ambience hangs like a gentle morning fog and the intricacies and beauty of the arrangements create something almost tangible in their efforts, like capturing a light dew on the tip ends of grass or the sticky moisture of well trampled soil. Nature permeates through this record from start to finish, gliding through its core like a bubbling brook.

TRACK LISTING

1 Home For Moss Valley
2 Cwm Elan
3 Bramley Moor
4 Fortingall Yew
5 Phoenix Works
6 Banks Of Mulroy Bay
7 Sloade Lane

Self-discovery doesn’t come easy. It’s usually a rite of passage to get burned before the wounds can heal and often takes a new perspective to truly understand yourself. 18 months and 10,000kms travelled since many needles first dropped on her debut LP Listen To Formation Look For The Signs, it’s safe to say with new album Preservation, Nadia Reid now knows herself extremely well.

“Preservation’ is about the point I started to love myself again. It is about strength, observation and sobriety,” Nadia says. “It’s about when I could see the future again. When the world was good again. When music was realised as my longest standing comfort.”

Through cavernous lows, blissful highs and globe-trotting adventures, music has been by Nadia’s side the entire way. Whether in New Zealand’s familiar rugged beaches and mountains, brutally windy Wellington, her hometown harbour Port Chalmers or the untrodden territory of faceless hotel rooms or the jungle in Kuala Lumpur, every episode of loss, heartbreak, and disappointment glimmers throughout. “Travelling inspires me. I’m learning that things need to happen for the writing to come. Like making time to be alone with my guitar. I’ve grown to crave that. I almost like to starve myself of it to crave it.”

For some, being so far removed from all you know would be unsettling, but Nadia is keen to embrace the challenge of moving forwards in the face of uncertainty. “This place of newness must be where all the good stuff happens,” Nadia reveals. “An artist must be uncomfortable, must tour the world, and mustn’t stay in her home-town for too long. I feel very happy and changed by my time abroad. I have fallen back in love with music, or perhaps learnt to trust her a little more. Often in times of exhaustion, confusion, and home-sickness, music has been the constant.”

An ode to self-reflection and self-betterment, Preservation is the sound of Nadia showing her true colours, taking back a bit of power, and learning more about herself. Deeply intellectual but felt by all, it punches harder than before. Nadia’s beautifully warm vocals coolly wrap around feelings of turbulence, and exude a gently improved confidence. “This record is about being OK with who I am in the world, and who I want to be. Learning to live with the fact I’m a person who operates differently to others,” admits Nadia. “I’m richer for the fact I am a musician. Without this way of being, I couldn’t write songs.”

Returning to the production skills of Ben Edwards in his Sitting Room studios and long term guitarist Sam Taylor, this time around everything is rubbed in more grit and channels Nadia’s deftly profound take on life and whilst we already knew it, her own realisation that it is music which drives her. “I remember recording the tracks, it was about 11 at night, and I felt almost transcendental, as if I was out of my body, singing these words to myself. That’s what these songs are; a confession to my future and past self.”

Nadia has seen the world she once knew become a whole lot larger. Simply singing her truth has taken her to becoming acquainted with her Scottish and Irish heritage during her first full European tour, downtime with long-time sister-from-another-mister Aldous Harding and even making the odd award shortlist along the way (NZ’s 2016 Taite Music Prize).

Rather than growth in its most typical sense of any artist finding their way in the world, Preservation marks a natural passing of time – what you pick up along the way is a bonus. “Making music feels like a very natural expression for me – to record songs and mark time a little. Just like a painter needs to paint pictures.” Sometimes those home comforts can be found a little closer than you might think.

TRACK LISTING

1. Preservation
2. The Arrow And The Aim
3. Richard
4. I Come Home To You
5. Hanson St Part 2 (A River)
6. Right On Time
7. Reach My Destination
8. Te Aro
9. The Way It Goes
10. Ain't Got You

Sometimes it can take years to find your calling. Not so, for wanderer Julie Byrne; whose power of lyrical expression and melodic nous seems inborn. But often, what comes naturally demonstrates against speed. Julie’s second album Not Even Happiness has taken time to evolve, but as it spans recollections of bustling roadside diners, the stars over the high desert, the aching weariness of change, the wildflowers on the coast of California and the irresolvable mysteries of love. Her new album archives a vivid world that would've otherwise been lost to the road and in doing so, Byrne exhibits her extraordinarily innate musicality.

In fact, some of the album’s songs took two years of fine tuning to get where they needed to be. And if you were to ask her why the follow up to 2014's Rooms With Walls And Windows has taken so long, you’d only be greeted with a bemused smile as though it's the strangest question she's ever been asked; “Writing comes from a natural process of change and growth. It took me up to this point to have the capacity to express my experience of the time in my life that these songs came from.”

Having counted Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Northampton, Massachusetts, Chicago, Illinois, Seattle, New Orleans as her home in recent years. For now, Julie has settled in New York City where she moonlights as a seasonal urban park ranger in Manhattan. Whether witnessing the Pacific Northwest for the first time (‘Melting Grid’), the morning sky in Colorado after staying up through the night at a house party in the mountains of Boulder (‘Natural Blue’), recording the passage of freight trains on the outskirts of Buffalo, New York ('Interlude'), or a journey fragrant with rose water; reading Frank O’Hara aloud from the passengers seat during a drive through the desert of Utah into the rainforest of Washington State (‘All The Land Glimmered Beneath’), Not Even Happiness is Julie’s beguilingly ode to the fringes of life.

Self-taught on the guitar after picking it up when her father became ill and could no longer play the instrument himself, Julie readily admits she can’t read music and doesn't even listen to it all that much - the first vinyl she owned was indeed, her own. Recorded with producer Eric Littmann (Phantom Posse), Julie laid down the new album in her childhood home in western New York state and offers an altogether bigger picture to its predecessor through a wider, yet subtle, exploration of instruments and atmospherics, Not Even Happiness reveals an artist who has grown in confidence over time.

Byrne's debut album was released back in January 2014 on Chicago based DIY label Orindal after initially being as two separate cassettes releases. Rooms With Walls and Windows went onto become a true modern-day word of mouth success story (it would have to be for an artist who shuns all forms of social media) and ended the year being voted number 7 in Mojo magazine's best albums of the year, with the Huffington Post calling it "2014's Great American Album". A collection of hushed intimate front porch psych-folk songs, that unknowingly recalled the greats, but felt very much for our time. It saw her travel to Europe over two summers playing the Green Man festival and End Of The Road, as well as lesser trodden tour paths around Europe.

Julie Byrne will take the songs from Not Even Happiness (the first release on a new record label Basin Rock, based in the Lancashire / Yorkshire border town of Todmorden) on the road throughout 2017.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Lightly strummed and impeccably arranged folk guitars meet with swaying and mournful vocals all purposefully and beautifully delivered as a shining example of minimal affectations with maximum results.

TRACK LISTING

1. Follow My Voice
2. Sleepwalker
3. Melting Grid
4. Natural Blue
5. Interlude
6. Morning Dove
7. All The Land Glimmered Beneath
8. Sea As It Glides
9. I Live Now As A Singer