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cian and producer Stephen Stannard’s band The Rowan Amber Mill and vocalist Angeline Morrison. The perennial Sumer is a Cumen In does make an appearance on Track 6 though.
2. Make a concept album that actually works. Out of a simple ecological message (i.e. stop trying to build on/frack/bury nuclear waste underneath our countryside) Stannard crafts a Manichean battle between man’s machines and the magic-charged landscapes along the Ridgeway national trail. Angeline’s warm, wise tones provide an anchor to ethe- real multi-layered harmonies, pastoral flutes, gentle piano and guitar, surging strings and the odd synth swoop. Stannard’s mantric, mythic lyrics conjure a world where “the time bleeds in the past,” culminating in the post- apocalyptic spoken piece in At The Circle’s End, pts I,II.
3. Package your album in a tin (not a bor- ing old digipack or – God forbid! – a jewel case, a TIN) filled with badges, a sticker and some occult-tinged photographs.
Rowan : Morrison have done all three of these things and so this is a Glowing Review.
rowanambermill.bandcamp.com Clare Button
KIRAN AHLUWALIA 7 Billion Kiran Music KM2018
This is a fine successor to Sanata : Stillness (2015). It consolidates and continues. Ahluwalia’s husband Rez Abbasi’s production and arrangements are tasteful and empa- thetic. Its density of colour draws on a wide palette of ‘outside’ influences including rock, funk and West African guitar. On Raina (‘Night’), for example, Louis Simao adds accordeon. In so doing he conjures the sonorities of Astor Piazzolla-esque bando- neon (meant as highest praise).
For lovers of forced trivia, 7 Billion has a
track entitled Saat (‘Seven’) where seven refers to “saat arab”. In the subcontinent’s numbering system, lakh (100,000) is followed by crore (10,000,000) and arab is one hundred crore or a billion. Incidentally, the album’s instant memory jog of a catalogue number reminds how the Grateful Dead’s Robert Hunter once told me he named Europe ’72 so they had a marker about when it came out.
A milestone work from a musical collec- tive at the forefront of Canada’s Indo-Pak- istani diaspora. Suggested entry points: Saat and Raina.
kiranmusic.com Ken Hunt
ALASDAIR ROBERTS, NEIL McDERMOTT &
TARTINE DE CLOUS Au Cube Okraina #12
It’s long been my contention that the best folk music is the stuff that you make round a table with your friends. In December 2017, Scots singer and guitarist Alasdair Roberts and fiddler Neil McDermott convened in just such a manner with French
singing trio Tartine de Clous – Geoffroy Dudouit, Thomas Georget and Guillaume Maupin. They did so not in the confines of someone’s kitchen, but in front of an audi- ence at Bristol’s Cube Microplex – with dis- creetly positioned recording microphones to capture the results.
The ever-prolific Mr Roberts contributes a few typically artful original songs, including Cyclone’s Vernal Retreat – on which the
Neil McDermott, Tartine De Clous & Alasdair Roberts
singers voices “nestle together, like birds” in a hypnotic guitar figure, and the palpably atmospheric Year Waxing, Year Waning. McDermott shines on Da Auld Resting Chair – a beautiful air composed by Shetland fiddle player Tom Anderson, while guitars entwine on an affecting version of Anne Briggs’ Go Your Way.
It’s the quality of the singing that sup- plies this album its core strength, demonstrat- ed to full effect on the unaccompanied, call- and-response Je Vous Al Menti Souvent and La Mere Cruelle (The Cruel Mother) – sung by Roberts in English with the refrains in French. The traditional Scots ballad Rosie Anderson provides another highlight, while the jaunty closer Les Aigullettes – and the lengthy applause that follows it – only makes the lis- tener wish they’d been there.
Hear a track on this issue’s fRoots 72 compilation
alasdairroberts.com Steve Hunt JACKEN ELSWYTH /
SPROATLY SMITH Betwixt & Between 3 Betwixt & Between Tapes
One of the (admittedly very few) disadvan- tages of becoming a quarterly publication is that Jacken Elswyth is now releasing albums faster than we can produce magazines in which to write about them. This, the third Betwixt & Between Tape, pairs a side of Jack- en’s exploratory five-string banjo playing with a side-long Sproatly Smith epic.
Elswyth performs splendidly authentic versions of old-time staples Glory In The Meet- ing House and Last Chance / Sandy River Belle and a mesmerising improvisation around the traditional English folk song Sweet Lemeny, with additional shruiti drones. The concluding Improvisation is an absorbing solo clawham- mer banjo piece that rolls and tumbles around the listener’s consciousness.
Flip the cassette over (or just stay still, if you have the CD/ DL version) and prepare to get on board the last train to Weirdshire. Developing through several movements, and described as “a sound collage meditation on life, death, and divinity,” Sproatly Smith’s Vichai is a head-spinning piece of sound alchemy, cojured from disparate sources including owl calls and ringing bells, sampled gospel songs, Hawaiian slide guitar, wooden flutes and football chants.
Attempting to describe the music on this recording inevitably merely highlights its apparent contradictions – all of which imme- diately dissolve upon listening. And that’s pretty much what Jacken Elswyth’s art seems to be all about – demonstrating that life is somehow more fulfilling when it isn’t divided up, compartmentalised and packaged into neat little absolutes. Oh, and that it’s also better with a banjo. Betwixt & Between Tapes – putting the ‘fun’ back into profundity.
betwixtbetweentapes.bandcamp.com Steve Hunt LES FRÈRES PARAN-
THOEN Into The Jungle Klam KR09
The brothers are fiddle player Alan and singer and button accordeonist Youen. Their repertoire is largely the dance music of the Morbihan region in the south of Brittany. They have been playing for dancing together for more than a quarter of a century and their previous albums have been as the melody instruments of one of Brittany's lead- ing quartets, Spontus, which has been much praised in these review pages.
They are regarded as innovators in that the usual pairing of instruments was the famed combination of bombarde and the biniou, the Breton bagpipe, which they have adapted for their own instruments and they play these tunes in the strict structures that the various Breton dance sequences demand, though this debut album as a duo shows that they are moving beyond that.
Fundamentally this is still functional dance music but three factors seem to con- tribute to this development. They have a life- time's experience of what will and what will not work for these dances and this firm grounding enables them to create whilst remaining rooted within their tradition. Thus they can display their obvious virtuosity whilst continuing to play purposeful dance music. A third factor is the very close empathy that they bring to playing together; some- thing that is usually found, as here, with close blood relations.
This progression means that they are extending their range to include concerts as well as dances in their performances; deserved- ly so because this is very interesting music.
klam-records.com Vic Smith
Photo: Laurent Orseau
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