Johnny Flynn’s sixth album, and the second co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane gathers songs that Johnny and Robert have written together since finishing their first joint album, Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021). At its heart are the oldest themes of all: death and renewal, darkness and light. The first five tracks are songs of burial, shadows and memory, while the final four are songs of awakening, light and love. The album turns around a central song, ‘The Sun Also Rises’, which stands with a foot in both dark and light.

Fuses poetry, story, landscape, history, nature and myth into a series of rich, strange songlines that criss-cross time and place, joining winter to spring, ancient to present and birth to death. As the Sun sets, so the Moon rises as its echo; as one light dies, another, altogether different light is born.

Partly recorded in an old Methodist chapel –now the home of Johnny and Rob’s friends, Cosmo and Flora Sheldrake.

Produced by Charlie Andrew (Alt-J, Marika Hackman).

BIOG
Johnny Flynn is a singer, composer, musician and actor. His musical releases to date include the studio albums A Larum (2008), Been Listening (2010), Country Mile (2013), Sillion (2017) and Lost In The Cedar Wood (2021). He has released two full live albums, Live in Washington DC (2014) and Live at the Roundhouse (2018) and various EPs and soundtracks. As well as touring the world with his band, Johnny regularly composes music for film, TV and theatre –– including work for period instruments at the Globe Theatre. Johnny’s recent acting projects include Hangmen and True West (for which he also composed the music) on stage and Emma, Beast and The Dig on film. He is currently appearing as Richard Burton in Jack Thorne’s sell-out play The Motive and the Cue, directed by Sam Mendes.

Robert Macfarlane is a writer of books about nature, people, place and landscape including Underland (2019), Landmarks (2015), The Old Ways (2012) and, with Jackie Morris, The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020). He also writes films (inc. Mountain and River, both starring Willem Dafoe), operas, plays and screenplays, and collaborates widely, including with artist Stanley Donwood, and musicians Cosmo Sheldrake, Jocelyn Pook and Karine Polwart. His work has been widely adapted for film, stage, television, radio, dance, music and performance, and his books have been published in more than thirty languages. In 2023 he was awarded the inaugural Weston International Award for Non-Fiction.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A rousing collection of songs from the neo-folk troubador Johnny Flynn (whose Detectorists theme is forever etched in my brain) and frequent collaboration partner Robert Macfarlane. It's a warming, bucolic selection that's every bit as beautiful as 2021's stunning 'Lost In The Cedar Wood'.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Uncanny Valley
2. Song With No Name
3. Burial Blessing
4. No Matter The Weight
5. Coins For The Eyes
Side B
6. The Sun Also Rises
7. The Wild Hunt
8. Through The Misty With You
9. Year-Long Winter
10. River, Mountain And Love

On his new album, Look Over The Wall, See The Sky, John Francis Flynn delicately unpicks traditional songs and rearranges them with an emotional force that sometimes leaves them unanchored, foating in a surreal space between the past and the present, the analogue and the digital, between love and tragedy.

In his frst single, Mole In The Ground, a cover of an American anti-establishment folk song recorded by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928, John allows the surrealism of the song to take centre stage, opting to speak rather than sing the words. His voice, too, lives beneath the ground of the melody, burrowing its way beneath hypnotic drums, dancing guitars, and sliding violins. By taking away the nursery rhyme-like melody of the song, we focus on our narrators' fantasies and desires, but also on "the weirdness of the song, and its aggressiveness. The last line is: I don't like the railroad man/ the railroad man will kill you when he can/ and he'll drink up your blood like red wine, and I wanted to get to grips with that emotion."

TRACK LISTING

1. The Zoological Gardens
2. Mole In The Ground
3. Willie Crotty
4. Kitty
5. The Seasons
6. Within A Mile Of Dublin
7. The Lag Song
8. Dirty Old Town

Yorkshire-born, London-based singer, songwriter, and producer Ethan P. Flynn’s debut album, Abandon All Hope pours twenty-four years' worth of experience into 8 eclectic tracks. Featuring backup vocals from rising singer, Ava Gore, Abandon All Hope is a bold statement to mark Ethan P. Flynn arrival as a true artist in his own right.

Abandon All Hope is the culmination of an intensely fruitful period of personal creativity that has seen the young artist collaborate with a host of familiar names including David Byrne, FKA Twigs, Jockstrap, and Vegyn. 44 minutes long, 22 minutes on each side (intentionally to be the traditional length of a 12” LP), recorded at Narcissus Studios in 12 days, the album is bound together by a unifying theme; an album in the old-fashioned sense. It recalls 70s greats like Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson while exploring feelings of longing and losing power to hope in situations of relationships, love, navigating anxiety, and the coming of age in the 21st century.

TRACK LISTING

1. In Silence
2. Abandon All Hope
3. Clutching Your Pearls
4. No Shadow
5. Leaving The Boys Behind
6. Bad Weather
7. Crude Oil
8. Demolition

O’Flynn and Frazer Ray - two much-celebrated UK producers and DJs - release their collaborative album, "Shimmer", on Ninja Tune imprint, Technicolour. The album arrives as a result of the duo’s love for the UK dance music scene, from garage to breaks, trance and hardcore. Frazer and O’Flynn’s vast knowledge and respect for underground cultures and genres shine through as a direct influence.

Smothered in a very crisp, very glossy, very now patina; high fidelity throughout and stylishly showing off what modern soundsystems are capable of. It's one of those albums that'll play right through on long, nocturnal night drives or soundtrack your afters whilst still in the spirit of the night before. Half the tracks can also be cherry picked by DJs to smash apart dancefloors as we transition into 2023. A highly functionally, dare-I-say accessible album which still pushes boundaries in terms of production and arrangements.

For fans of Overmono, Soundbwoy Killah, Ross From Friends,HAAi.. Two Shell etc. 

TRACK LISTING

Luna Bay
Call For Noise
Love Fading
Troopa
Holsten
Kolfax
Satyr
Rosetta Feat. Byulah And Ekhe
Tando
Katara
Light It Out
You Need Me

Ethan P. Flynn presents the ‘Universal Deluge’ EP.

Plunging into the darker side of experimental pop, Flynn combines electronics with stripped-back acoustics, underpinned by his well-recognised idiosyncratic voice; a style which has seen Ethan work with the likes of FKA Twigs, David Byrne and Black Country, New Road, and pinned “as great as Bowie, I’m just waiting for the world to see it… he’s a legend in the making” by slowthai.

TRACK LISTING

Father Of Nine
Distraught
Vegas Residency
Spoils
Cheerleader
The Universal Deluge
Enough Is Enough

‘Lost In The Cedar Wood’, Johnny Flynn’s much-anticipated fifth album, is co-written with his friend Robert Macfarlane.

Johnny and Robert began work on the album in the first weeks of the pandemic, wanting to make music that sang of those dangerous, disorienting spring days; when birdsong was brighter –– and the sense of bewilderment more powerful –– than any of us had known before.

They drew inspiration in part from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving work of world literature; an epic poem from Ancient Mesopotamia that contains the earliest version of the Flood Myth. To Johnny and Robert, Gilgamesh resonated eerily with the present moment –– and it catalysed their song-writing.

For Gilgamesh is a story of friendship, love, loss, grief, bad governance and good dreaming; of natural disaster and environmental crisis. It also contains the first recorded act of human destruction of the natural world: when Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the Sacred Cedar Wood, slay the guardian spirit of the forest, and cut down the trees with their axes, thereby bringing catastrophe upon themselves.

Johnny and Robert wrote the album between March 2020 and February 2021, during a year in which we all wandered unsure of our path, lost in the cedar wood. The songs were composed in large part as a correspondence, through a back-and-forth of notebook pages, voice-recordings and WhatsApp-messages, at a time when lockdowns made meeting in person impossible. The first eight songs were recorded in an off-grid cottage deep in a Hampshire forest, with the sounds of chainsaws felling trees drifting in through the windows along with the birdsong.

The result is an album at once urgent and ancient, which fuses poetry, landscape, myth and music into something unique. These are songs that ring with hope, love and sadness –– and one need not know anything about The Epic of Gilgamesh to be touched by them.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A beautifully evocative and wonderfully weighted collaboration between two of the most talented voices in folk music today. Both Flynn and Macfarlane are right at home here, crafting warm melodies and richly woven harmonies around a solid instrumental core.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Ten Degrees Of Strange - Johnny Flynn
2. The World To Come - Johnny Flynn
3. Gods And Monsters - Robert Macfarlane
4. Bonedigger - Robert Macfarlane
5. I Can’t Swim There - Robert Macfarlane

Side B
6. Nether - Robert Macfarlane
7. Flood In The Desert - Johnny Flynn
8. Tree Rings - Johnny Flynn
9. Enkidu Walked - Robert Macfarlane
10. Home And Dry - Robert Macfarlane
11. Ferryman - Robert Macfarlane

‘Live At The Roundhouse’ is an electric performance of ten years’ worth of songs; recorded without overdubs, it pays homage to the past whilst pointing propitiously to the group’s future. The album also features a bonus studio cut; the much requested and never released 3-verse rendition of Johnny’s ‘Detectorists’ theme.

Live At The Roundhouse’ is 24 tracks long and pulled from a decade’s worth of music. Fans will hear renditions of songs from Johnny’s “Masterclass” (4/5 The Independent) debut album ‘A Larum’, sophomore ‘Been Listening’, an album “radical in its honesty” (8/10 Drowned in Sound), ‘Country Mile’, “an extremely clever and nuanced record” (Mojo) and his most recent effort, ‘Sillion’, which explored the idea of man’s endeavour to connect with the earth while separated from it; “Another exploratory and remarkably high-caliber LP” (AllMusic 4.5/5). The album also features a bonus studio cut; the much requested and never released 3-verse rendition of Johnny’s ‘Detectorists’ theme. Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit are without a doubt one of the most consistently exhilarating live bands around, inspiring an undying devotion among fans and peers who will cherish ‘Live At The Roundhouse’ for its gritty and impassioned renditions of now-classic songs. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: One of the most entrancing talents around, Johnny Flynn mixes brimming psychedelic grooves with shimmering folky acousticry, running through grooves into a cascade of rhythm, and their live show is a perfect encapsulation of this stunning musicianship and unmistakable energy.

TRACK LISTING

Disc: 1
1. Raising The Dead
2. Lost And Found
3. In The Deepest
4. The Night My Piano Upped And Died
5. Barleycorn
6. Howl
7. Murmuration
8. Brown Trout Blues
9. Country Mile
10. Hard Road
11. Wandering Aengus
12. Jefferson's Torch
13. The Landlord
14. Cold Bread

Disc: 2
1. The Wrote And The Writ
2. The Water
3. Tickle Me Pink
4. Introducing The Band
5. The Box
6. Heart Sunk Hank
7. Detectorists
8. Fol-De-Rol
9. Eyeless In Holloway
10. Detectorists (Full Studio Version)

Josh Scott is ready to unveil the unique and stunning fruits of his labour on his self-titled debut album as the distinctively named Aero Flynn - a record that may never have seen the light of day, had it not been for his old friend Justin Vernon of Bon Iver fame.

Up to now Scott may have been living life as an outsider but solid relationships sit at the very heart of his musical make up. Whilst his grandfather played a key influence on his life and new stage name (“I grew up with him and he worships old cinema so I’ve seen every Errol Flynn film,” explains Scott of the reason behind his new guise, “It’s my Narnia.”), his saving grace has become those who surrounded him during the 2000s while attending the University Of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. During that time Scott’s band Amateur Love was the most talked about band in the small college town’s scene.

After struggling with the high expectations thrust upon him (so esteemed was his song writing to those who knew him back then that the ‘Lip Parade’ sited in Bon Iver’s ‘Holocene’ is a direct reference to one of Scott’s earlier songs), Scott disbanded the group, moved to Chicago and stepped further back into the shadows. After being diagnosed with a mysterious autoimmune disease affecting his kidney in addition to crippling untreated depression, he went underground. That is, until now.

Refusing to let Scott go without a fight, Vernon eventually managed to coax him back out of hibernation by establishing a label on which to reissue the one and only Amateur Love album. This was the spark; Scott’s interest was piqued and he began writing and recording what would become Aero Flynn’s deeply personal self-titled debut. The writing for it began in Scott’s empty Chicago apartment and it brilliantly displays a newfound exploration of longform composition techniques and ambiguities rather than the simple versechorus- verse-type song structure he had mastered. Once the songs arrived at Vernon’s April Base Studios in rural Wisconsin (where he and Scott coproduced the self-titled debut together) the songs were stretched and manipulated further into their spaced out ethereal final form.

With a dazzling cast of musicians, including Bon Iver players Mike Noyce, Sean Carey, Rob Moose and CJ Camerieri plus Justin Vernon himself, guitarist Matt Sweeney, pedal steeler Ben Lester and Solid Gold’s Adam Hurlburt, recording progressed well and, over the course of a year, an album that many had spent over a decade waiting for was finally finished.

TRACK LISTING

Plates
Twist
Dk/Pi
Crisp
Tree
Floating
Maker
Brand New
Moon Beams